Edwards’ on-the-record comments offered an incredibly rare insight into how the CIA approaches, and focuses on innovation. His comments have been slightly edited for clarity.
What's my best definition of innovation at the CIA? I'm not sure I have the perfect or exact definition, but the foundation is speed, agility, and relevance with a relentless focus on mission. The challenge is that the speed has to match the speed of our digital disruptors.
John Edwards, Deputy COO, CIA
"Mission moves fast and is only getting faster. We must evolve. We must harness our creativity. We must be innovative to meet mission need. And we must do this at the speed of mission and not at the speed of government. Equally important, the old saying that the enemy of good enough is ‘best’. I read somewhere that speed trumps accuracy and doing something is learning something. We want the good enough, but we want it faster.
So, the $64,000 question is how? How do we do this, and more importantly, how do we do it effectively and consistently across a massive 70+ year old institution with a strong culture and diverse and unique mission sets?
The answer lies first in our people and second, in our partnerships. Our officers need an environment that supports the means to innovate and implement ideas. This starts with a culture of education and change. We must show our officers that success can come from failure and that failure is nothing to be ashamed of. This is particularly difficult in an organization full of Type-A personalities where too often our fear of an idea not being accepted and embraced is our biggest barrier to innovation. This thought process must extend beyond our millennial generation employees up to our middle and upper-level managers and be rewarded once an idea is embraced. It needs space to grow and evolve in order to take hold.
To help ideas flourish, we have instituted formal and informal mechanisms to empower innovation. We're using CIA internal crowdsourcing and crowd-funding platforms within established governmental regulations as well as rapidly prototyping solutions through crowd-tasking tools, innovation hubs, and evaluation environments, using these internal crowdsourcing and crowd-funding mechanisms. The DCIA initiated a challenge to find solutions to intelligence and mission problems and move them through the innovation process from ideation to implementation.
The Director seeks a broad range of proposals for these challenges and invites every officer at every level to think creatively about mission enhancing ideas that they would like to see funded, from workplace solutions to facility enhancements, to innovative technology. We're also using Shark Tank-like events where officers get to pitch their innovative ideas before an expert panel of senior leaders who provide real-time feedback and ultimately, select the winning candidates for funding.
CIA’s partnerships with industry and academia are vital to our leveraging of emerging technologies to gain a comparative advantage against our adversaries. We are pursuing new and exponential ways of thinking; establishing innovation hubs is one way we are doing that. Innovation hubs across the U.S. in locations Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas foster highly-collaborative and creative environments for multi-disciplinary teams to brainstorm and build rapid prototypes to accelerate adoption of cutting-edge digital capabilities. These outposts also showcase the success of innovation hack-a-thons that expose elements of the IC to new and emerging technologies in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, infrastructure, and security.
Partnerships to harness the power of industry are nothing new. Rather, they go back to the origins of our agency. One longstanding, out-of-the box partnership is with In-Q-Tel. Over the last 20 years, they've made hundreds of investments that have translated into hundreds of adoptions within the IC.
In addition, we've harnessed the relentless security and innovative pace of Amazon by adopting C2S, a commercial cloud service that was exclusively dedicated to the intelligence community. Additionally, with IC marketplace, third-party industry partners can offer their products in a pay-as-you-go, on-demand subscription model. This has greatly sped up software selection, acquisition and development. In many cases, new software can be stood up in minutes instead of months.
Now that we’ve explored the ‘how’ of innovation, let me get back to the ‘why’. Earlier, I touched on mission, but what is mission? To me, one simple way to explain it is to protect and maintain the United States’ decisive, competitive, strategic advantage over our adversaries.
To accomplish this mission, Director Haspel has outlined her strategic priorities and I believe you will see opportunities for innovation throughout, keeping in mind that innovation can be big and small.
First off, diversity and inclusion. A workforce that reflects America because our strength is in our difference. Our mission demands that we draw deeply from our nation’s rich and diverse talent pool, so, how do we find creative ways to recruit and make sure we're bringing in the best and the brightest from every walk of life?
Next, the focus on investing and collecting more heavily against our hardest issues and targets. With justifiably heavy focus on counter-terrorism since 9-11, how do we take the lessons learned from those campaigns and apply them to nation-state adversaries?
Third, increase the number of officers stationed overseas. Because the crux of our mission lies in foreign intelligence, we must be in it to be part of it. So, in an age of sensed, smart cities, how do we safely operate overseas?
Fourth, piggy-backing off a larger footprint overseas, we need our officers to be language capable and better attuned to the cultures in which they operate. That said, we're placing a renewed emphasis on foreign language training and expertise. What are the latest technologies to aid them?
Fifth is partnerships. I discussed our long-standing relationships with industry, which for me, represents a whole of nation approach to problem solving. But we also need to better engage with our IC and government colleagues and bolster our relationships with our foreign counterparts. How do we improve and better secure our communications systems? Like everything else, it's something that must consistently evolve to remain secure. How do we share our data at the speed of mission? How do we do this while still keeping our information safe?
Sixth, America cannot maintain a decisive advantage over our adversaries if our nation is ailing. Opioids and other drugs flowing into our country represent a real threat to our nation. How do we target and take down those who would do us harm?
John Edwards, Deputy COO, CIA
"All of these current intelligence problems need creative, innovative solutions both large and small. They are all currently bring worked and I believe our people and partnerships will get us there. We take on the hard problems and we succeed."
Former Director Tenet always said, "CIA doesn’t do easy. The hard jobs come to us.” We are the nation's first line of defense.
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