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Benchmarking Bottom Up Defence Innovation in the Australian Defence Force

An International Comparative Analysis

Executive Summary

This paper reports the findings from a study of bottom-up innovation in defence organisations. It presents a comparative study of bottom-up innovation activities at the Australian Defence Force (ADF), New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF), United States Armed Forces (US military), and British Armed Forces (BAF). The NZDF, US military and BAF are benchmarked against the ADF with the purpose to identify best practices in bottom-up innovation and to identify gaps in best practice in the ADF.

To fulfil this purpose, the study traces the relationships between levels of authority, funding opportunities, innovation practices, open innovation, and measurement. It further describes how bottom-up innovation builds upon an innovation system grounded in people, structures and culture. The benchmarks thus derived are intended to help the ADF to develop a sustainable innovation capability that adds to its ability to deter potential adversaries.

The study is primarily grounded in the qualitative analysis of 29 interviews with personnel working on bottom-up innovation at the ADF, NZDF, US military and BAF at various levels of authority across various branches. Additionally, the researchers created a database of over 500 documents on bottom-up innovation in the defence organisations of 18 other countries. Of these documents, 397 came from the four militaries under comparison. The remaining 100-plus documents were used in a later stage of the analysis to corroborate the findings. We identified nine benchmarks. The benchmarks inform the governance (three), innovation processes (three) and organisation (three) of bottom-up innovation in the defence sector.

The three benchmarks for governance are senior leadership support, strategic alignment, and funding. The ADF performs strongly against these benchmarks, but there are gaps in senior leadership involvement and longer term strategic alignment, and an overreliance on ad hoc and competitive funding. It is also noteworthy that the coordination of joint bottom-up innovation initiatives lies with the branches, while elsewhere it is coordinated at a ministerial level. This situation might explain difficulties in sustaining joint activities and cross-branch learning.

The three benchmarks for innovation processes are methods, open innovation, and measuring impact. The ADF is bringing many methods to bear. An oversight, however, is the relative absence of stage gate approaches. ‘Stage gate’ is a project management term that refers to a methodology that improves project outcomes and prevents risk by adding gates, or areas for review, throughout your project plan. While it might suit the ADF’s operational and technological demands for advancing innovation, the downside is that opportunities are missed for design thinking, agile, and lean startup. It leads to difficulties in transitioning solutions into continued application. The ADF is strong in open innovation, but there are still opportunities for it to learn from the US military and the BAF, which have both doubled down on open innovation and have larger national innovation systems to draw on. Measurements of innovation performance are in place at the ADF, but need reviewing as regards the specific demands and processes of bottom-up innovation. The present measures are too static.

The three benchmarks for organisation are people, structure, and culture. The ADF has invested in the people benchmark but could improve embedding bottom-up innovation in its organisational structures. Without this, bottom-up innovation could fade. Culture remains a benchmark under development, not only in the ADF but more broadly in each of the studied militaries.

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OP-26-Benchmarking-Bottom-Up-Defence-Innovation.pdf (2.42 MB) 2.42 MB

Publication Date

Publication Identifiers

ISSN (Print) 2653-0406
ISSN (Digital) 2653-0414
DOI: https://doi.org/10.61451/267511