The Pentagon will have a new leader in charge of innovation, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced on Friday.
The Defense Department’s chief innovation officer will ensure the Pentagon remains focused on innovation, work on implementing recommendations from the Defense Innovation Board and run innovation contests.
“Many different organizations have recently embraced this position, and also started to regularly run these kinds of innovation tournaments and competitions — including tech companies like IBM, Intel and Google — and it’s time we did as well, to help incentivize our people to come up with innovative ideas and approaches,” Carter said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He did not say who will be getting the job.
The creation of a chief innovation officer position was one recommendation made by the Defense Innovation Board during its first meeting this month.
Carter announced that the Pentagon will also move forward on two other recommendations from the board: implementing targeted recruiting initiatives to bring computer scientists and software engineers from the Reserve Officer Training Corps into the department, and investing more broadly in machine learning.
Members of the Defense Innovation Board include Google Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt, who serves as chairman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Other recommendations from the board on which the department has not yet acted include establishing an institute dedicated to studying artificial intelligence and directing a security review of every Pentagon system.
Boosting innovation has been a key priority of Carter’s term as defense secretary. In addition to launching the board, he also stood up Pentagon outposts in Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin to encourage technology partnerships with the commercial sector.
Some lawmakers have supported the effort to get a leadership position at the Pentagon focused on acquisition. In his chamber’s version of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would get rid of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics and instead split it into two roles: one focused on innovation and the other focused on business. Neither went by the name chief innovation officer.
