‘Godsend’ Memo Streamlines Innovation at War Department

War Department’s January Innovation Ecosystem memo is as “godsend” as the Pentagon looks to speed up innovation timelines and “dominate” in its realigned Critical Technology Areas, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology Foundations Jacob Glassman said Thursday at GovCIO Media & Research’s Defense IT Summit in Arlington, Virginia.

“The memo has been a godsend for us. We are now a very focused department, and that is critical for us to deliver something fast,” said Glassman. “We’re now looking at how do we put all our resources together to bear that delivery correctly.”

A National Ecosystem of Shared Digital Tools

Glassman said the memo enabled “horizontal integration,” improving coordination among research labs and departments. Previously, partner labs could take months or years to reach final decisions due to infrequent meetings and limited communication.

“We’re all in the same room, and I’m seeing firsthand things that normally would have been routed up chains and take months to get a decision [happen quicker],” said Glassman.

Bringing Pentagon departments and labs together has also increased visibility into projects and their status, he added. The model is intended to support a broader national innovation ecosystem that includes partners such as NASA, the White House and the Energy Department.

“We’re going to be collecting data to create a map of what we have,” said Glassman. “Knowing who’s doing what and who’s good at what, let’s you actually zoom out from just a Department of War ecosystem to a national ecosystem, and see we use these digital tools together.”

An AI-First Approach

Glassman said AI is becoming the default as the Pentagon works to accelerate operations. He credited the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office and the department’s launch of GenAI.mil, saying the tool is becoming a natural part of employees’ daily workflows.

“The fact that we’re already at 1.1 million users, we’re already changing the culture, and we have not even remotely started,” said Glassman. “This is just generative AI, wait until we get into agentic workflows. It’s now very quickly becoming default part of our workforce’s workflow, and that’s what I consider a win.”

Becoming More Business-Friendly

The Pentagon is also exploring new ways to bring commercial innovation into the department.

DOW launched a pilot program offering no-fee commercial evaluation license for a selection of patents that were “stuck in labs.” The “patent holiday” aims to maximize the value of the department’s $3.5 billion annual research investment by easing licensing pathways and helping industry partners accelerate commercialization.

“Within the past five weeks, we’ve already had two license agreements. We have about another 16 that are in active negotiation,” said Glassman. “We’re using the applied AI portion of the portfolio, horizontally integrated for a task that came under S&T to work smarter.”

Glassman said the department is becoming “more business-friendly” to accelerate adoption of emerging defense technologies.

“Industry has incredible amounts of innovation, private equity and other things that make them more willing to take risks and move a lot faster,” said Glassman. “We take a lot more industry meetings, and we’re much more open to them.”

He added that industry transparency is critical to overcoming deployment barriers.

“Be transparent with us and say, ‘well, if it wasn’t for this law or this policy,’ because we’ve been able to change policies within a day,” said Glassman. “We want to work much more collaboratively. We want to take your innovation, and we want to give you opportunities to take risk.”