To foster a culture of innovation across the materiel life cycle, the U.S. Army Materiel Command will kick-off the first Innovation Summit at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, Nov. 18-20.
The summit is a part of AMC's Innovation Campaign which is inspired by the Army Operating Concept and the strategy of Force 2025 and Beyond. It will examine the Army's materiel development and sustainment processes to determine more efficient and effective ways to operate across the materiel life cycle. Using a team approach, the Innovation Campaign will analyze threat and materiel solutions spanning the life cycle.
"As we seek to build an agile, adaptive Army of the future in the face of an increasingly complex threat environment, the Innovation Summit will provide a valuable forum to our stakeholders," said Patrick O'Neill, AMC Chief Technology Officer. "There is a need for synchronizing institutional processes so that we can better leverage our inherent capabilities alongside those of our partners in industry and academia as we modernize the force."
The gathering will be the first in a series of quarterly summits in fiscal year 2016, encompassing an overarching Innovation Campaign. The first summit is an opportunity for key Army and government decision-makers to gather and define the challenges and barriers to innovation.
"We want to ensure that the Army is making the best investments in an increasingly austere and uncertain budget environment," said O'Neill. "The Army Chief of Staff's emphasis on the future Army requires an openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things in an increasingly complex world."
The summit and the overarching campaign are in support of similar Association of the United States Army and Army Training and Doctrine Command events, promoting communication among the Army's organizations that play a critical role in materiel development and sustainment.
"The Innovation Campaign, and especially the first Innovation Summit, is about bringing our communities together, socializing the barriers to innovation we collectively face, and then determining the best path forward at an enterprise-level," said O'Neill. "The path forward will emphasize effective and efficient processes that lead to leap-ahead technologies."
The first Innovation Summit will bring together all those who play a critical role in the materiel life cycle from concepts and requirements definition, to prototyping and production, to procurement and sustainment. Participants will include members from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, respective Program Executive Offices and Program Managers, in addition to TRADOC, AMC, and their respective major subordinate commands.
Following the first summit, the initial ideas formulated will move into development and implementation phases in subsequent summits. As the Innovation Campaign proceeds, the organizations involved will expand to incorporate outside stakeholders and additional U.S. government representatives to optimize the impact of these initiatives.
Social Sharing