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Ministry of Defence

Learn more about how the UK Ministry of Defence uses Wazoku’s Challenge Driven Innovation to find novel solutions to complex problems.

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A Cross-Sector Innovation approach

The MoD is one of the world’s leading defence organizations with a wealth of resources, human talent, and research to depend on. Teams in the MoD know that they could potentially create something entirely independently, but it would likely not be the best solution – as it would miss out on crucial external factors.

By collaborating and opening up Challenges to those with specific scenario experience, the MoD can gain more information from those who know best what is currently available, and what parts of various ideas can be combined to create a powerful solution. This has been evidenced in the High Altitude Challenge, with some of the syndicates coming together to create a proposal for a new capability by combining component parts.

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the value of Royal Navy Challenges by finding companies they didn’t know existed

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Challenge can lead to multiple solutions and opportunities

Aligning with Strategy and Policy

The UK Defence Solutions Center also keep an eye on strategy and policy documents coming out of Defence, other areas of government, and also from industry. This sits alongside work with academia to bring everything together when identifying overlaps.

Where teams see overlaps and shared Challenges, the MoD uses publicly available data from the web to identify numerous factors:

  • Which companies are operating in the space
  • Defining their specialties
  • Where their funding comes from
  • The types of products they produce to the market

What are the benefits of using a Challenge Driven Approach?

  1. Driving conversation rather than people investing time and money into building a product which may not be optimized
  2. The approach allows people to be more open and collaborative in how to approach solving the problem
  3. It opens up conversations with many industry partners who can support with other problems a department may not realize it was facing. The Royal Navy believes they’ve unlocked three or four times the value of one of their Challenges through meeting companies they didn’t know existed.

Want to find out more about how the MoD use Challenges?

 

How does Wazoku accelerate the MoD’s outcomes?

By using Wazoku’s Challenge Driven approach, the MoD does not define what the end product should look like. The system helps to create scenarios against a problem statement, and then look for a solution against that scenario. This results in the MoD receiving input, innovation, and creativity beyond their original potential scope, and even from adjacent areas.

Want to find out more about how the MoD use Challenges?

Download Ministry of Defence Story