040 – Improving Potato Chips and Space Travel: NASA’s Steve Rader on Open Innovation

Innovation doesn’t just happen out of thin air. It requires a conscious effort, and team-wide collaboration. At the same time, innovation will be critical for NASA if the organization hopes to remain competitive and successful in the coming years. Enter Steve Rader. Steve has spent the last 31 years at NASA, working in a variety of roles including flight control under the legendary Gene Kranz, software development, and communications architecture. A few years ago, Steve was named Deputy Director for the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. As Deputy Director, Steve is spearheading the use of open innovation, as well as diversity thinking. In doing so, Steve is helping the organization find more effective ways of approaching and solving problems. In this fascinating discussion, Steve and Brian discuss design, divergent thinking, and open innovation plus:

• Why Steve decided to shift away from hands-on engineering and management to the emerging field of open innovation, and why NASA needs this as well as diversity in order to remain competitive.
• The challenge of convincing leadership that diversity of thought matters, and why the idea of innovation often receives pushback.
• How NASA is starting to make room for diversity of thought, and leveraging open innovation to solve challenges and bring new ideas forward.
• Examples of how experts from unrelated fields help discover breakthroughs to complex and greasy problems, such as potato chips!
• How the rate of technological change is different today, why innovation is more important than ever, and how crowdsourcing can help streamline problem solving.
• Steve’s thoughts on the type of leader that’s needed to drive diversity at scale, and why that person should be a generalistPrioritizing outcomes over outputs, defining problems, and determining what success looks like early on in a project.
• The metrics a team can use to measure whether one is “doing innovation.”

Resources and Links

Designingforanalytics.com/theseminar Steve Rader’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-rader-92b7754/ NASA Solve: nasa.gov/solve Steve Rader’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveRader NASA Solve Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASAsolve

Quotes from Today’s Episode

“The big benefit you get from open innovation is that it brings diversity into the equation […]and forms this collaborative effort that is actually really, really effective.” – Steve “When you start talking about innovation, the first thing that almost everyone does is what I call the innovation eye-roll. Because management always likes to bring up that we’re innovative or we need innovation. And it just sounds so hand-wavy, like you say. And in a lot of organizations, it gets lots of lip service, but almost no funding, almost no support. In most organizations, including NASA, you’re trying to get something out the door that pays the bills. Ours isn’t to pay the bills, but it’s to make Congress happy. And, when you’re doing that, that is a really hard, rough space for innovation.” – Steve “We’ve run challenges where we’re trying to improve a solar flare algorithm, and we’ve got, like, a two-hour prediction that we’re trying to get to four hours, and the winner of that in the challenge ends up to be a cell phone engineer who had an undergraduate degree from, like, 30 years prior that he never used in heliophysics, but he was able to take that extracting signal from noise math that they use in cell phones, and apply it to heliophysics to get an eight-hour prediction capability.” – Steve “If you look at how long companies stay around, the average in 1958 was 60 years, it is now less than 18. The rate of technology change and the old model isn’t working anymore. You can’t actually get all the skills you need, all the diversity. That’s why innovation is so important now, is because it’s happening at such a rate, that companies—that didn’t used to have to innovate at this pace—are now having to innovate in ways they never thought.” – Steve “…Innovation is being driven by this big technology machine that’s happening out there, where people are putting automation to work. And there’s amazing new jobs being created by that, but it does take someone who can see what’s coming, and can see the value of augmenting their experts with diversity, with open innovation, with open techniques, with innovation techniques, period.” – Steve “…You have to be able to fail and not be afraid to fail in order to find the real stuff. But I tell people, if you’re not willing to listen to ideas that won’t work, and you reject them out of hand and shut people down, you’re probably missing out on the path to innovation because oftentimes, the most innovative ideas only come after everyone’s thrown in 5 to 10 ideas that actually won’t work.” – Steve