Inside the national security Innovation Game

Blog by Simon Fabri, HMGCC Director of Product and Engineering

Big tech firms, little tech firms, tiny start-ups, frontier labs, huge primes, AI labs, biotech companies, pharmaceutical research units, world class universities, cyber research hubs...the list goes on.

These are just some of the entities driving innovation and technological advancement. Here in government, we know that very well.

But bringing together the creators of new technologies outside of government with those who need them within the national security community is an involved task. And many of you have questions to ask us about it.

Here I’m going to give a flavour of how we operate behind the famously secret doors of HMGCC.  I will also describe our innovation model namely how we bring together external and internal sources of innovation and align them against the priority problems facing our national security partners. Piecing outside innovation together with government tech needs can feel like putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. In this blog, I hope to show how these innovators fit in.

Many technology advances take place outside government. Our task is to harness these technologies and apply them to our most sensitive challenges. It is only by being open about how we work with industry and academia, that we can lower the barriers to working with us.

We are aiming to solve two problems that are often in tension with each other. On one hand, we need to be able to rapidly embrace available cutting-edge and reliable technology solutions that can solve today’s challenges, while meeting our legislative and regulatory obligations. However, we also need to explore and build on new and untested, potentially game-changing disruptive technologies that could change the very way we operate. If we don’t explore these advances, we can be sure that someone else will.

We do this in three ways.

1)    Understanding national security needs

Operating in a secret, often tightly compartmentalised, world can pose challenges to internal or external technical teams working on a project as, understandably, they may often not have full visibility of the operational context.

So how do we bring clarity? We understand national security needs really well and we work to a small set of defined mission priorities, which describe the biggest challenges faced by national security. These are aligned with our key mission outcomes. They underpin everything, from the engineering work we do at HMGCC, to any external engagement; be that for early-stage speculative research, operational technology, the HMGCC Co-Creation challenges we issue or the academic research we sponsor.