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MITRE Fuels Its Own Innovation Engine June 2005
Floating films that capture pathogens. An air traffic control system that gives controllers more flexibility in choosing cost-effective routes from take-off to landing. Making GPS systems jam-resistant for military uses. A system to extract intelligence information from broadcast news video. These are just a few examples of how MITRE has used creativity and innovation to solve its customers' problems. The floating films are made from oils and glycoproteins found in plant and animal tissue. Some sugars within certain glycoproteins act like biological Velcro and grab onto pathogens like a burr that sticks to your clothes. It's hoped that the films can be used as a low-cost method to rapidly survey surface waters for pathogens. The air traffic control system, called the User Request Evaluation Tool (URET), provides automated decision-support capabilities to air traffic controllers, allowing them to better track en route aircraft and to predict air conflicts up to 20 minutes into the future. This conflict probe tool gives pilots and controllers more flexibility to manage air traffic efficiently without compromising safety. The rapid targeting project for the Department of Defense, called "Cursor on Target," uses machine-to-machine communication to detect and destroy a target much faster than a series of voice and hand-carried messages. The anti-jam approach developed for the government's Global Positioning System (GPS) keeps jammers from interfering with GPS satellite signals, thus enabling our warfighters to use GPS for navigation in hostile electronic environments. The Broadcast News Navigator—built on our novel algorithms for speech, language, and image processing—takes broadcast news and automatically segments, clusters, and summarizes the stories, customizing information for each user. MITRE has come up with hundreds of innovations over the years to solve problems of national importance. That's one of the roles of a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC), and MITRE manages three FFRDCs, sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. MITRE's first innovative work was on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system, a collaborative effort with other companies to build the first major real-time, computer-based command and control system. Designed after World War II as a new air defense system to protect the United States from long-range bombers and other weapons, the SAGE system sent information from geographically dispersed radars over telephone lines and gathered it at a central location for processing by a newly designed, large-scale digital computer. As the system evolved, SAGE broke new ground in numerous technologies, including radar, communications, computers, and information displays. "MITRE exists to be creative—to innovate," says Dave Lehman, senior vice president for information and technology at MITRE. "It happens in many ways. It may start with the idea of an individual, such as Elaine Mullen, who is developing the pathogen-capturing film. Or innovation may come from collaborative efforts such as SAGE. "The Cursor on Target project was an internal collaborative team project involving people from several fields who had long-term knowledge of the sponsor and its challenges. The team not only found a technical solution, but one that was engineered so that it would integrate easily into existing systems." The innovation process at MITRE is similar in many respects to that of for-profit companies, but different in other ways. "Other companies have very good creative people," says Lehman. "But MITRE has a very good collaborative environment as well. Most innovations take more than one mind, and we give people the time and opportunity to share ideas and focus on new technologies and how they might apply to our sponsors' challenges. Another important difference is that our people have the freedom to take risks—to explore an emerging technology that may or may not be the solution to a problem—while a for-profit company couldn't pursue the possibility without a business case with a high probability of a good return on investment. Our 'return' is a contribution to the solution of an important national problem. "For example, how do you lower the cost of GPS anti-jam capabilities?" asks Lehman. "To replace satellites with a better GPS system will take too long because satellites cost so much. Creating a better receiver with anti-jam capabilities is easier, but it's a very risky technical challenge. Most commercial companies won't take on the risk because it doesn't fit with their business plan. MITRE can take on the risk of attacking that problem because we're not worried about the market size for the application." Lehman says that MITRE's innovation strategy involves more than incremental improvements in a process or technology. "It involves getting our researchers and scientists in a dialog with our government customers, asking 'if you could do X with this technology, how would that help?' That's when you make really disruptive changes and real progress follows. You need those discussions and those kinds of relationships with the users."
MITRE's Technology Program Innovation is aggressively promoted through the MITRE Technology Program (MTP), which manages a number of activities involving research and development. These include research programs funded by sponsors and focused specifically on their missions, as well as projects funded by MITRE that focus on long-term research that will be applied 5-to-10 years in the future. The MTP also gives out innovation grants to encourage creative ideas. These grants provide the staff member with just enough time and money to determine whether an idea is a viable research topic. If the work performed under the innovation grant is successful, it often becomes a MITRE-sponsored research project. The MTP also sponsors numerous activities to bring MITRE scientists and engineers around the organization together. One way to do this is by naming technology integrators. Technology integrators know the business of their division and the breadth of the technology program so that they can marry up teams of people to solve problems. Says Lehman: "The combination of our people and processes makes for a powerful engine of innovation." The MTP also oversees MITRE's Technology Transfer Department, which helps staff transfer our technology to commercial companies that will make MITRE's technology available, affordable, and supportable for our sponsors. "Customers are looking for innovation," says Lehman. "They want solutions to their problems, and our job is to bring new and emerging technologies into the company to see how they apply to customer problems, develop possible solutions, and work with government contractors to get these ideas out there and into use." —by David Van Cleave Related Information Articles and News
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