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.
2) Empowering product teams
At HMGCC we run empowered product teams. You will recognise the product model we use in many tech companies. These teams own their roadmaps across the whole lifecycle for their products and are empowered to allocate people and money where they think it will have the biggest impact.
In a world in which the threat landscape is constantly evolving and new tech advances are announced daily, speed and agility are crucial to success. Our iteration cycles need to be fast and responsive.
Our product teams work closely with their mission customers in order to understand their needs as well as the engineering complexities.
3) Enlisting the tech ecosystem
This brings us to the final component of our innovation model – how we engage the huge array of innovators outside our walls – all of you.
We bring together different entry points, each with a distinct purpose.
For early-stage research, Danielle George, the Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security, is responsible for sponsoring scientific research in academic and private sector labs that offer potential for changing the way we operate. We will also coordinate work with UK Research and Innovation to sponsor research in areas such as quantum technologies for sensing, timing and positioning, engineering biology and AI-related problems.
NSSIF, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, directly invests in pioneering start-ups developing dual-use technologies that have strategic impact to the UK’s national security and defence space. By being among those sponsoring work programmes aimed at developing and trialling these technologies in relevant operational environments, we can bridge the gap between early-stage proof of concepts and deployable technologies.
HMGCC Co-Creation issues unclassified challenges, each with a typical duration of 12-16 weeks to help solve some of our trickiest operational problems. All these challenges can be seen on our website.
Our outreach to industry and academia also includes our Top 10 Technologies campaign, inviting collaboration on those tech areas we believe have the biggest opportunity to give our mission partners an operational edge.
As ever, not all our engagement is unclassified. We continue to work with key partners at a classified level to build some of our most sensitive capabilities.
Bringing it all together
Our HMGCC Co-Creation challenges are built on the close working relationships between our product and mission teams. This in turn creates a rapid route to market for technology coming through our external challenges. And the final part of the model? This is the moment when we reach that crucial stage of making technologies operationally viable, when they can finally play their part in keeping the UK safe.
Creating the technologies needed by national security relies on managing an intricate network of relationships, working closely with those at the frontline of national security needs, and matchmaking innovation from the outside.
Everyone together plays their part in bringing pace, urgency and understanding to the creation of the UK’s best operational technology. So, have a think – how could you get involved?