DOD Mission Engineering and Integration Explorative-Exploitative Architecture for Technology Innovation

The ability of U.S. Department of Defense to achieve timely innovation in support of U.S. National Defense and Military Strategies continues to increase in significance. The growing challenges in U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) technological innovation in a context of global security and rapid pace of global competitiveness continue to reveal many shortcomings in current weapon systems development and acquisition practice. As the pace of technological innovation is accelerating, the DoD faces the challenge that the same disruptive technological advances are also being made available to or developed by its adversaries. Based on literature review, no innovation system theory exists that accounts for organization interaction with the environment given socio-economic objectives and associated missions, including a less closed-system approach to interactions across the private and public sector boundaries. The Mission Engineering Explorative-Exploitative Architecture for Innovation expands Bennan & Tushman’s (2003) and O’Reilly & Tushman (1996) explorative-exploitative theory from a process management, innovation behavior, and private firm’s performance within the context of environmental technological change. A System Theory framework based qualitative content analyzes the innovation and Department of Defense dataset and produced a set of initial seed-categories. These seed-categories were interpreted resulting in architectural views and associated propositions. The resulting architecture contributions are propositional definitions for Mission Engineering and Integration Management functions in the context of military missions and complex situations including constructs for identifying socio-technical misalignments as basis for understanding and identifying technological innovation opportunities and associated partnerships