🎯Goals
What we hope to achieve with this project.
You know from our Story that this project is all about innovation in national security, two words about which there is much debate and very little understanding, much less concrete value or clear opportunities.
For that reason, we have a few primary goals that we hope to achieve or at least advance toward with this work:
Increase understanding of the national security innovation ecosystem.
Improve data literacy of national security stakeholders, especially government employees, in order to support further innovation.
Support a learning mindset and opportunities to experiment by integrating a variety of frameworks for building and questioning.
These are certainly not very specific goals, nor are they very measurable, so it is worth taking a look at each one individually to see how they might be further refined and measured.
Increase Understanding of the Ecosystem
When we think about this overarching goal, our minds immediately go to users and value:
Who do we want to better understand the ecosystem?
Why is increased understanding valuable to them?
How will we create or capture value to meet that need?
Our hypotheses about these different questions are captured in Use Cases, but we plan to return and add more SMART-style goals. We expect Feedback will help with this as well.
Improve Data Literacy
The topic of data literacy is gaining traction within the national security community as more and more users seek to apply data-enabled capabilities to their activities, be they analytics or artificial intelligence or security factors.
Our experience (and also Research) strongly supports the need for improved data literacy to adapt to the changing global environment, especially in national security and in developing innovative approaches or solutions.
More and more we are overcome by data and unable to advance (especially those of us in Government) because we may lack access to simple Tools or our understanding of seemingly technical Concepts is not well-founded in Research. We may not have experience with Courses that could address this and might feel overwhelmed at the number and variety of options that are available.
By taking a project-based approach, the creation of which adds value on its own, we hope to inspire, connect, and empower people to seek out opportunities to improve their knowledge, gain experience working with data and associated technologies, and bring others with them.
Support a Learning Mindset
We feel that a learning mindset is important to support broader innovation initiatives because, as you may have experienced yourself, innovative efforts often fail, but failure and national security have a history of not playing well together (turns out national security is a bit of a bully).
By setting this out as a goal, we hope people will take these failures and start to ingest them as learnings instead of character flaws.
Not all failure is good, to be sure, and we do not believe that there is any one-size-fits-all approach to innovation or a "fail fast" mentality that will be easily and universally adopted. It takes People for that kind of change to occur, and it is those same People who are also Contributors or even just consumers of this project that will be the change agents needed to keep moving us forward in a very complex world.
We think that the Education opportunities are important, not just to Improve Data Literacy, but for personal growth and a sense of fulfilment regardless of one's job or position.
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