Organizing for Innovation in the Armed Forces: A Logical Thinking Process Approach

Introduction

Innovation is one of the key drivers for any organization’s effectiveness, improvement, competitiveness, and ultimately long-term sustainability. This applies equally to the Armed Forces, hereafter designated as the military organization, or to corporations at large.

Innovation is a broad concept which can be classified according to distinct reference frames. One can distinguish between different categories, for example product innovation and service innovation, which may have process innovation underneath. One can also distinguish according to the level of impact, for example (2) incremental innovation, the kind of innovation that is close to the concept to continuous improvement; (2) radical and disruptive innovation; or (3) recombination innovation – the kind of innovation that results from recombining existing products, services or processes into something new. The scope of this text is, however, about “organizing for innovation”, which relates to organizational change that places the organization optimally to innovate. Corporations and firms have long been pursuing optimal forms of organizing for innovation. Today, military organizations almost everywhere are trying to change their organizational architectures in order to achieve such desirable paradigm, to become more innovative.

With so much at stake, senior military leaders need to place such subject on the top of their agendas to become more innovative. Military leaders across all branches face significant challenges, from constrained budgets to broaden scopes of responsibilities and operating, which demands a more proactive attitude, in a way not dissimilar from the modern corporation that competes in the marketplace (Charan, 2005, Nueno, 2016). This demands military leaders, similarly to corporate leaders, to step into subjects such as strategy development, risk management, and supporting the lower military ranks in a joint effort to improve organizational development - a subject that includes a need to rethink how to organise for innovation (Lorsch, 2012; Hill & Davis, 2017). For example, being diverse is a critical factor in fostering innovation across organizations.

Military leaders shall proactively monitor the diversity barometer score within the organizations they are responsible for. This is especially critical at upper echelons where it is important to prevent higher rank officers to surround themselves with professionals who mirror them. Such is particularly critical during times of tight budgets, when the “fixer” types of leaders may be put in charge (Tomaso, 2005). These “fixers”, conversely to “growers”, are typically designated to sort out performance problems in face of constrained budgets and the urgent need for corrective actions. However, fixers may be tempted to surround themselves by other “fixers”, hence demotivating the raise of new ideas, initiatives and innovation across organizations – such is especially critical in organizations which depend heavily on innovation, as would be the case of the military.

The approach taken in this text places a focus on organizing for innovation main drivers, where the whole organization is taken as a political system. Attention is drawn to four main governing areas, which will further support the development of a pragmatic and deployable model. Such model brings usefulness for academic circles and practitioners alike, therefore decreasing the gap between these two worlds. This comprehensive model follows a logical thinking process, which starts by identifying the problem – the need to increase the innovation capability of organizations – then progressing towards an effective way of architecting organizational factors that promotes innovation within the organization.

This chapter has four main parts, in addition to the introduction. section 2 presents some relevant background knowledge on the subject of organising for innovation, in order to sustain and bring sustainability to the military organization. section 2 introduces a holistic approach to organizations, by introducing the Business Policy Model (BPM) (Valero & Lucas,1991; Calleja & Melé, 2017). On the same section Miller & Wedell-Wedellsborg’ innovation framework is introduced and blended with the business policy model, hence providing a holistic approach to innovation capability building within an organisation. By holistic, it is meant a systems view of organizations, and both concepts are interchangeable within the scope of this text.