Why is there a need for Mission-Led Innovation?
Every organisation, worldwide, is under pressure to change: budgetary pressures, to cope with rapidly evolving threats, to take advantage of new technologies, or because they recognise the need respond quickly and prepare to cope with uncertainty. Innovation is often the way that organisations respond to these pressures – it is vital to helping modernise and gain operational (or business) advantage.
Why now?
The world is fundamentally different; the ‘mission’ changes with greater frequency compared to the past, no matter which market, geography or function you operate within. Traditional innovation or research processes often deliver results that are defunct by the time they come to fruition. Mission-Led Innovation is therefore critical today, as the pace of change requires faster and adaptable innovation processes to keep focus on the mission; getting ahead and staying ahead of the threat.
What are the key characteristics of Mission-Led Innovation?
- Customers - being totally customer and user centric: defence, critical infrastructure, security
- Operational outcomes - focussing on things that are going to make significant, measurable difference to our customers and end-users
- Collaboration - working with our customers, end-users and our partner ecosystem collaboratively – jointly coming up with the solution that is best for the situation.
- Complexity - dealing with complex problems, situations and environments which require our expertise and experience and that of our partner ecosystem
- Pace - working iteratively to ensure that they get the capability embedded in the operations as soon as possible
How do we deliver it successfully?
To deliver Mission-Led Innovation effectively, we use a mix of skills and capabilities; from R&D to customer engagement, as well as the means to link these together to deliver the assured solution. These bring expertise in integrating the broad spread of requirements – both technical and operational – to keep innovation focused on a customer’s constantly moving mission. We use diverse teams and our ecosystem of partners ranges from academia and Small/Medium Enterprises to large enterprises.
- Mission-Led Innovation has a different mind-set with behaviours that include more trust between our teams and our customers' and partners' teams. Success requires a shift to a relentless focus on the customer mission, with a collaborative approach that leverages the best that each ecosystem can bring in order to deliver the right outcomes for the customer.
