Pentagon establishes Defense Innovation Advisory Board

The Pentagon has established a new “Defense Innovation Advisory Board” in order to import technological innovation and best practices from Silicon Valley.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the panel, modeled on the Defense Business Board, would facilitate the Pentagon becoming more “innovative and adaptive”.

The board’s mandate will be to provide leaders in the U.S. Department of Defense with independent advice on innovative and adaptive means to address future organizational and cultural challenges.

“Just as the Defense Business Board provides advice to the department on best business practices from the private sector, the Defense Innovation Advisory Board will provide advice on the best and latest practices in innovation that the department can emulate,” said Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook.

The board will seek to advise the department on areas that are deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis in business decision making, the use of mobile and cloud applications, and organizational information sharing.

The board will not engage in discussion of military operations or strategy.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google and parent company Alphabet will chair the board, which will be composed of up to 12 people who have successfully led large private and public organizations and excelled at identifying and adopting new technology concepts.

Carter and Schmidt will jointly select the board, with an aim to appoint members that will represent a cross-section of America’s most innovative industries. The board will have up to a dozen members.

As chairman of Alphabet and as the author of “How Google Works,” Schmidt has a unique perspective on the latest practices in harnessing and encouraging innovation and in the importance of technology in driving organizational behavior and business operations, Cook said.

Article Topics

big data  |  biometrics  |  cloud computing  |  cybersecurity  |  Department of Defense  |  Google  |  innovation  |  security applications  |  U.S. Government