BOSTON – The Defense Department has assembled a powerhouse cadre of science and technology thinkers and entrepreneurs to serve as an advisory body on how to harness commercial innovation for military advantage.
Along with the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx), Secretary of Defense Ash Carter created the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) to guide his initiative to create a close and cooperative relationship between the military and private tech firms.
At a launch event for a DIUx headquarters in Boston, Carter also announced 10 additions to the board, which is “charged with keeping DoD imbued with a culture of innovation in people, organizations, operations, and technology…to support people who innovate, those creative figures in our department who are willing to try new things, fail fast, and iterate; and also to ensure that we’re always doing everything we can to stay ahead of potential adversaries.”
Alphabet – formerly Google [GOOGL] – chief executive Eric Schmidt was tasked with filling out the board with “some of the most innovative and public-spirited people in America.
They include Amazon [AMZN] founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos, who has been on the forefront of commercial uses for unmanned aerial systems, among other tech endeavors. Also tapped is celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, an evangelist for science education and host of the PBS show “Cosmos.”
Other additions to the board are heads of popular social media platforms, which the military has been eager to harness for recruitment and to keep pace with terrorists and adversaries that use the Internet to organize.
Reid Hoffman, the head of LinkedIn [LNKD] and Instagram [FB] COO Marne Levine will join the board. They are joined by Code for America’s founder and executive director, Jennifer Pahlka; Google’s vice president for access services, broadband and fiber network pioneer Milo Medin; and United Technologies [UTX] senior vice president for science and technology, J. Michael McQuade.
University of Texas chancellor and former commander of Special Operations Command, Adm. Bill McRaven and noted historian of innovation Walter Isaacson will join alongside the Wharton School’s organizational psychology professor Adam Grant and CalTech dynamical systems and bioengineering professor Richard Murray.
Three scholars from Cambridge, Mass., have agreed to sit on the board. They are Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein, computer theorist, MIT professor, and co-founder of Applied Invention, Danny Hillis and the president and founding director of the Broad Institute, Eric Lander.
“The board is starting its work and I look forward to benefitting from its thinking” Carter said.
The board’s first mission is to identify private sector best practices in areas like network security that could have quick and efficient applications within the Defense Department. Carter posited the recent Hack the Pentagon pilot program, which invited hackers to help find vulnerabilities in Defense Department networks, similar to the bug bounties that several of America’s leading tech companies have.
Some of the board members have already begun their preliminary work. Earlier this month, they spent time with airmen in Nevada and sailors in San Diego, and today they’re meeting with soldiers at Fort Bragg, and visiting Central Command and Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Carter said.