The Battle of Moore's Chasm And Who Will Win The Next War

There is a battle going on right now.  It is being fought by every military in the world.  

Victory in this battle is crucial.  The militaries' on the winning side will likely be on the winning side of the next large-scale war.  The losers will likely be forgotten, studied only for the mistakes they made.

This is the Battle of Moore's Chasm.

This battle is taking place everywhere.  There are physical manifestations of it in Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait, and Gaza, but there are equally important conceptual and theoretical manifestations of it in the Pentagon, on Arbatskaya Square in Moscow, and deep inside the August 1 Building in Beijing.

What this battle is about and how to win it are the subjects of this article.

What Is The Battle Of Moore's Chasm?

To understand this battle it is necessary, at first, to travel back to 1962.  It was then that a young professor of rural sociology, Everett Rogers, published what was to become the second most cited book in all the social sciences, Diffusion of Innovations.  

While the book contains much that is still relevant today, the part that is important to the current battle is the idea that the "market" for an idea, an innovation, a new concept, or a technology generally follows a bell curve and that this bell curve can be divided into five major sections of users (See chart below):  Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. 

Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

Fast forward to 1989, when two researchers at the famous consulting firm, Regis McKenna, Inc. (RMI), Warren Schirtzinger and James Lee, hypothesized and then demonstrated that there was a "chasm" between the early adopters and the early majority.  

This chasm existed largely due to the different motivations of the members of these groups.  Innovators and Early Adopters are very much into cool, new things.  They tend to be more enamored with the potential of a new technology or process than they are with the utility or scalability of these products.  Early and Late Majority motivations, on the other hand, typically have more to do with solving particular problems and doing so at the lowest cost and at a scale that is appropriate for their organization.

Another researcher at RMI, Geoffrey Moore, picked up on the idea and, in 1991, published what was to become one of the most influential business books ever, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. Now in its third edition, it has sold over a million copies and is considered by Inc. magazine as one of the top ten marketing books ever written. Think Insights has a good article that lays out the main ideas in detail, but for our purposes, their chart showing the chasm is sufficient:

Think Insights (January 3, 2024) Crossing The Chasm – Technology Adoption Lifecycle. Retrieved from https://thinkinsights.net/strategy/crossing-the-chasm/.

Most importantly, Moore's Chasm has become synonymous with the place where good ideas go to die.  Whether it is a lack of capital, innovator inexperience, or an inability to get traction in the much more lucrative Early and Late Majority markets, failure to bridge the chasm leads, at best, to relegation to a niche market and, at worst, to inevitable decline and bankruptcy. 

While almost all of these ideas and the literature accompanying the chasm have come out of business journals, it has a direct and immediate correlation with issues faced by militaries around the world.  Indeed, Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth recently said:

“This is a crucial moment for the Army to summon our ingenuity, to innovate and invest in emerging technologies, to test and develop in uncharted areas like artificial intelligence and contested domains like space and cyber, to reshape and transform the force to be more adaptable and flexible.”

Yet, across the globe, the difference between how much militaries want to innovate and how much they are actually innovating seems to be heading in the wrong direction.  As the Boston Consulting Group highlighted in its report last year on the defense innovation readiness gap:

"One of (the report's) most important findings is that the defense innovation readiness gap significantly increased in the year since our first study. Across 10 of the 11 dimensions of readiness assessed, MoDs failed to match their 2021 results, by an average of 8%."

Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that this chasm exists within the US Department of Defense as well.  A recent report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology put it this way:

"However, under the DOD’s current organizational structure, defense innovation is disconnected from defense procurement. This division limits innovation offices’ ability to affect technological change across the military and excuses procurement offices from integrating cutting-edge capabilities into major systems and platforms." (Italics mine)

The Battle of Moore's Chasm is real, and right now, no one is winning.

Who Will Fight This Battle?

While there are a number of possible ways to win the battle (the CSET paper, for example, references three), all of these courses of action require the right people to implement them.  Acquisition officers, policy wonks, commanders, and others all do and will have their role to play.  The most important warrior in this battle, however, is the innovation champion.

Developed about the same time as Diffusion of Innovations Theory, the idea of an innovation champion was first put forward by Dr. Donald Schön in the Harvard Business Review article, "Champions for radical new inventions."  Since then, thousands of articles (Google Scholar says about 2140) have been written about the role, traits, and importance of innovation champions in driving modernization and incorporating emerging technologies across a wide variety of fields.  

All of the more modern definitions of innovation champion are similar to the one developed by researchers at the German Graduate School of Management and Law:  "an innovation champion is an individual or a group of individuals who is willing to take risks to enthusiastically promote innovations through the various stages of the development process."

This same paper identified five skills, seven traits, and three different kinds of knowledge that were characteristic of innovation champions based on a systematic literature analysis looking at 85 of the most influential journal articles on the topic (See image to the left).

The approach here is similar to the approach taken by the US Army in teaching leadership.  With leadership, the Army focuses on Attributes (roughly equivalent to Traits in the chart to the left) and Competencies (roughly equivalent to Skills and Knowledge in the chart).  A fundamental premise of Army leadership training is that "most people have leadership potential and can learn to be effective leaders."  The same could be said, perhaps, for innovation champions.

While the approach is similar, there is not a one-to-one correlation between what the Army thinks makes a good leader and what is necessary for an innovation champion (See chart below and to the right).

Source:  ADP 6-22, ARMY LEADERSHIP
AND THE PROFESSION, 2019
 

In short, while routine Army leadership training likely covers many of the attributes of an innovation champion, it is equally likely that there are several gaps that will need to be filled if the Army is to have the warriors it needs for the ongoing battle.

Specifically, having the minimal technical knowledge necessary to champion particular innovations jumps out as one such requirement.  Many soldiers are so deeply involved in the day-to-day activities of running the Army or fighting in the country's conflicts, that they have little time for understanding arcane emerging technologies such as 3D printing, quantum computing, synthetic biology, 6 and 7G telecommunications systems, augmented reality, and others. Yet decisions, potentially costing billions of dollars, regarding the development, testing and fielding of these technologies will need to be made regularly and soon if the US Army's technical advantage is to remain.

Likewise, would-be innovation champions will need to learn the transformational leadership skills necessary to manage teams of experts from disparate fields.  Most military officers have grown up in an environment similar to Machiavelli's Kingdom of the Turk, which "is governed by one lord, the others are his servants; and, dividing his kingdom into sanjaks, he sends there different administrators, and shifts and changes them as he chooses."  

This hierarchical organization with its emphasis on commanders and their intent suddenly gives way when confronted by interdisciplinary teams of experts and contractors in the diverse technical fields common to innovation activities.  Here the comfortable chain of command often is replaced with something akin to Machiavelli's Kingdom of the Franks, where officers find themselves "placed in the midst of an ancient body of lords, acknowledged by their own subjects, and beloved by them; they have their own prerogatives, nor can the king take these away except at his peril."  Leading innovation activities, in short, requires different skills than leading at the tactical and operational levels.

Where Will These Champions Come From?

Some of these Skills and Knowledge categories also typically require a certain level of experience.  For example, all officers understand their organization to a certain extent, but it takes a relatively senior officer to have a feel for the entire enterprise.  Likewise, officers, as they move from one assignment to another, develop useful networks, but the kind of depth and breadth necessary to lead innovation activities typically requires a deeper rolodex.  

This kind of officer with the experience, organizational understanding, and networks to do this kind of work are generally at the level of Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel, the O5's and O6's of the Army.  LTC Richard Brown put it bluntly in his essay for AUSA, "Staff colonels are the Army’s innovation center of gravity."

Officers this senior can often come with some baggage as well, however.  For example, unless an officer's career has been carefully managed, it is certainly possible that some of the essential Traits of an innovation champion, such as creativity, risk-taking, or optimism, have been suppressed or even beaten out by an unforgiving system.  Fortunately, the right training and environment allows much of this damage to be repaired.  Creativity, for example, "is something you practice...not just a talent you are born with."

All this--filling in technical knowledge and leadership gaps while simultaneously re-energizing officers closer to the end of their careers than to the beginning--is, in military terms, a "heavy lift," a difficult, perhaps impossible, job.  Making it even more challenging is the fact that there is only one realistic opportunity to do it and that is at a senior service college.  In the Army's case, that is the US Army War College.  

The War College, as it turns out, is the critical chokepoint in the Battle of Moore's Chasm.

The 10 month stint at the War College comprises the last in-depth, formal military education most senior officers will receive.  After this, they typically move on to senior staff positions or take command of brigade sized units.  A relatively few of these graduates will go on to become generals and most will complete only one or two more assignments before retiring.  If officers don't get it at the War College, they are unlikely to get this kind of specialized education and training once they get back to the field.

Fortunately, I think the War College understands this generally and I am involved in two specific activities that are deliberately designed to address these challenges, the Futures Seminar and the Futures Lab.

The Futures Seminar use real questions from real senior defense officials to jumpstart a year long project designed, typically, to not only delve deep into the world of technology as well as more generalized "futures-thinking" but also to gain practical skills in managing highly diverse teams of experts as the students seek to integrate their thinking in pursuit of the best possible answer to their sponsor's question.

The Futures Lab also seeks to fill the tech knowledge gap but in a more hands-on way, allowing students an opportunity to spend as much or as little time as they want learning the ins-and-outs of technologies such as 3D printing, drones, virtual reality, and robots.  With a wide variety of technologies and expert assistance available, the Lab creates an environment designed to re-awaken creativity, enthusiasm, and risk-taking.

Who will win?

Andrew Krepinevich, a military strategist and award winning author, in his recent book, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, states:

"Viewed from a lagging competitor’s perspective, failing to keep pace in exploiting the potential of an emerging military revolution risks operating at a severe disadvantage. Consequently, the common challenge for all major-power militaries in a period of military revolution is to be the first to identify its salient characteristics and exploit its potential. Silver medals are not awarded to those who come in second."

If the side that innovates best, that not only employs emerging technologies but also combines them into a system where the whole can be more than the sum of its parts, is the side that wins, then the crucial battle, the first fight, is the Battle of Moore's Chasm, and the US Army will need trained and ready innovation champions to win it.

Note:  The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. 

What If "Innovator" Was A Job Title?

I have been thinking a lot about innovation recently.  It occurred to me that the US Army has
a number of official specialties.  We have Strategists and Simulators and Marketers, for example.  Why not, I thought, make Innovator an Army specialization?  

I tried to imagine what that might look like.  I know my understanding of Army manpower regulations and systems is weak, but bear with me here.  This is an idea not a plan.  Besides, what I really want to focus on is not the details, but how the experience might feel to an individual soldier.  So, this is one of their stories...

I made it! The paperwork just became final. Beginning next month, I am--officially--a 99A, US Army Innovator.

The road to this point wasn’t easy. I graduated college with a degree in costume design and a ton of student debt. After my plans to work on Broadway fell through (Who am I kidding? They never even got off the ground), I had to do something. The Army looked like my best option.

For the last two years, I have been a 68C, a "practical nursing specialist", working out of a field hospital at Ft. Polk. My plan had always been to make sergeant and then put in my OCS packet. Things changed for me after a Joint Readiness Training Center rotation.

Patients kept coming to us with poorly applied field dressings. They were either too tight and restricted blood flow or too loose and fell off. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that there might be a combination of fabrics, that, if sewn together correctly, would be easy to apply, form a tight seal to the skin, and still be easy to change or remove.

As soon as I got back to the barracks, I hit the local fabric store, pulled out my sewing machine, and made a prototype. It took a few tries (and lots of advice and recommendations from the doctors and nurses in the unit) but eventually I got it to work. I never thought I would be able to use both my nursing skills and my costume design skills in one job but here I was, doing it!

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my new kind of field dressing until one of the RNs made me demonstrate it for the hospital commander. He watched without saying a word. He finally asked a few questions to make sure he knew how it worked, and then things got quiet.

Finally, my RN spoke up, “I think we could really use something like this, Sir.” He stood up straight and said, “I agree.” Then he looked at me. “I’m going to hate to lose you, Specialist,” he said, “but I think you need to put in for an MOS reclassification.”

Until the hospital commander told me about it, I had never even heard of 99A. There were some direct appointments, of course, but those were coming out places like MIT and Silicon Valley. For normal soldiers like me, getting into the Innovation Corps was more like going into Civil Affairs or Special Forces. You had to have some time in service but, more importantly, you had to have a good idea.

At first, it was easy. I simply submitted my idea to a local Innovation Corps recruiter.  I included some pictures and a short video that I shot on my cell phone of my prototype in action.  The recruiter told me that the Army used the same “deal flow” system used by venture capitalists. I’m not sure what that all entails but, in the end, it meant that my idea was one of the 50% that moved on to the next level.

For more info on deal flows see, Basics of Deal Flow.

My next step was a lot more difficult. You can think of it as the Q course for Army innovators. I went TDY for a month to the Army’s Innovation Accelerator in Austin, Texas. Like all business accelerators, the goal was to give me time, space, mentorship and (a little) money to flesh out my idea. I worked with marketing experts and graphic designers to come up with a good name and logo. I worked with experts in the manufacturing of medical equipment to help refine the prototype. I even had a video team come in and make a great 2 minute video showcasing the product. It was exciting to see all of the other ideas and to have a chance to talk about them with the enlisted soldiers, officers, and even some college students and PHDs--all trying to bring their ideas to life.

The Army crowdsourced the decision about which projects got to move on from the accelerator. That meant that each of us put together a “pitch page,” kind of like what you would see on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. Units all across the Army had a fixed number of tokens they could spend on innovative projects each quarter. Each of us needed to get a set number of tokens or we would not be allowed to move on. In the end, out of the hundreds of applications and the dozens of people at the accelerator, I was one of the 10 chosen to move forward, one of 10 who gets to call themselves a US Army Innovator.

That’s where I am today. My next step is a PCS move to a business incubator. I could stay here in Austin with the Army’s business incubator, but the Army has deals with incubators all over the country. I am hoping to get a slot in one of the better medtech incubators in Boston or Buffalo. It will be a two year tour (with the possibility of extension), which should give me plenty of time to bring my idea to market, with the Army as my first customer.

For me, the best part is that I am now getting Innovation Pay. It is a lot like foreign language proficiency pay or dive pay. I’m not getting rich but it sure is better than what I got as a specialist. More importantly, there are ten tiers, and each time you move up, you get a pretty substantial raise. This means that once you become an Innovator, you are going to want to stay an Innovator.

The other great part about this system is that you can move up as fast as you can move up. There are no time-in-service requirements. If I am successful in the business incubator, for example, I could be a CEO (Innovator Tier 6) in just a couple of years. Running my own company at 28? Yes, thank you!

And if I fail? I know there are still bugs to work out with my idea. I have to get the cost of production down, and there are lots of competitors in the medical market. Failure could happen. While I won’t be happy if it does, the truth is that, by some estimates, 90% of all start-ups fail. The Army has thought about this, of course, and gives Innovators three options if their projects fail. 

First, I could go back to nursing. I would need some refresher training but my promotion possibilities wouldn’t take a hit. The Army put my nursing career on pause while I was in the Innovation Corps. 

The second option is that I come up with a new idea or re-work my old one. The Innovation Corps has developed a culture of “intelligent failure,” which is just a fancy way of saying “learn from your mistakes.” In an environment where 90% of your efforts are going to fail, it is stupid to also throw away all of the learning that happened along the way. Besides, the Army also knows that persistence is a key attribute of successful entrepreneurs. The Army wants to keep Innovators who can get up, brush themselves off, and get back in the saddle. 

Finally, I might be able to go back to the accelerator as an instructor or take a staff position in Futures Command or one of the other Army organizations deeply involved in innovation.

I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of soldiers, enlisted, NCOs, and officers, on my journey. The Innovation Corps is pretty new and, while many have heard about it, almost none of them really understand what it takes to become an Innovator. That doesn’t seem to matter though. Almost all of them, and particularly the old-timers, always say the same thing: “The Army has been talking about innovation my whole career. I am glad they finally decided to do something about it.”

For me? I’m just proud to be part of it. Proud to help my fellow soldiers, proud to help the country, and proud to be a US Army Innovator.

The Future Is Like A Butler

Imagine someone gave you a butler. Completely paid for. No termination date on the contract. What would you do?

At first, you’d probably do nothing. You’ve never had a butler. Outside of movies, you’ve probably never seen a butler. You might even feel a little nervous having this person in the room with you, always there, always ready to help. 

Once you got over your nervousness, you might ask the butler to do something simple, like iron your shirts or make you some coffee. “Hey,” you might think after a while, “This is pretty nice! I always have ironed shirts, and my coffee is always the way I like it!” 

Next, you’d ask your butler to do other things, more complicated things. Pretty soon, you might not be able to imagine your life without a butler.

The parable of the butler isn’t mine, of course. It is a rough paraphrasing of a story told by Michael Crichton in his 1983 book, Electronic Life. Crichton, more famous today for blockbusters like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and WestWorld, was writing about computers, specifically personal computers, back then. Crichton correctly predicted that personal computers would become ubiquitous, and the main goal of Electronic Life was to help people become more comfortable with them. 

The story of the butler was a launching point for his broader argument that personal computers were only going to get more useful with time, and that now was the time to start adopting the technology. It worked, too. Shortly after I read his book, I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64.

Today’s Army faces much the same problem. The difference, of course, is that the future presents today’s military with a much broader set of options than it did in 1983. Today, it feels like the Army has been given not one but hundreds of butlers. Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, robotics, nanotech, and many more fields are arguably poised to rapidly and completely change both the nature and character of warfare.

Despite the deluge of options, the question remains the same, “What do I do with this?”

The answer begins with Diffusion of Innovations theory. In his now classic book of the same name, Everett Rogers first defined the theory and the five types of adopters. Innovators, who aggressively seek the “next big thing”, are the first to take up a new product or process. Early adopters are the second group. Not quite as adventurous as the innovators, the early adopters are still primarily interested in acquiring new technology. Early majority and late majority adopters sit on either side of the midpoint of a bell-shaped adoption curve and represent the bulk of all possible adopters. Finally come the laggards, who tend to adopt a new innovation late or not at all.

(Source: BlackRock White Paper)

For example, the uptake of smartphones (among many other innovations) followed this pattern. In 2005, when the smartphone was first introduced, only 2% of the population (the Innovators) owned one. Three years later, market penetration had only reached 11%, but, from 2009-2014, the smartphone experienced double digit growth each year such that, by 2016, some 81% of all mobile phones were smartphones. This S curve of growth is another aspect predicted by Diffusion of Innovations theory.

Not all innovations succeed, however. In fact, all industries are littered with companies that failed to achieve critical mass in terms of adoption. While there are many reasons that a venture might fail, management consultant Geoffrey Moore, in his influential book, Crossing the Chasm, states that the most difficult leap is between the early adopters and the early majority. Early adopters tend to be enthusiastic and eager to try the next big thing. The early majority is more pragmatic and is looking for a solution to a problem. This difference in perspective accounts for much of the chasm.

Source:   Agile Adoption Across the Enterprise – Still in the Chasm

The Army is aggressively addressing the innovation and early adoption problem by developing sophisticated plans and tasking specific units and organizations to implement them. The need to innovate is, for example, at the heart and soul of several recent policy announcements, including the 2019 Army People Strategy and the 2019 Army Modernization Strategy. Beyond planning, the Army is already far along in doing some of the hard work of innovating. Indeed, organizations and projects as small as TRADOC’s Mad Scientists and as large as the Army Futures Command Synthetic Training Environment are examples that show that Army senior leaders understand the need to innovate and are acting now to put early adoption plans into motion.

But what about the rest of the Army? The part of the Army that isn’t directly involved in innovation? The part that is not routinely exposed to the next big thing? That hasn’t, to get back to the original point, ever had a butler?

Again, Diffusion Of Innovations theory provides a useful guide. Rogers talks about the five stages of the adoption process: Awareness, persuasion, decision, implementation, and continuation. For the rest of the Army, awareness, and, to a lesser extent, persuasion, should be the current goal. 

While this may seem simple, in a world of hundreds of butlers, it is deceptively so. With so many technologies poised to influence the Army of the future, it becomes extremely difficult to focus. Likewise, merely knowing the name of a technology or having some vague understanding of what it is and what it does is not going to be enough. No one in the Army would claim that you could learn to fire a rifle effectively merely by watching YouTube videos, and the same holds true for technologies like autonomous drones, 3D printing, and robots.

The only way to engender true understanding of both the strengths and weaknesses of an innovation is to provide a hands-on experience. Cost alone should not be a significant impediment to exposing the bulk of the Army to the technologies of the future. Autonomous drones are now available for under $1000, entry level 3D printers can be had for as little as $200-$700, virtual reality headsets are available for $300-1000 and build your own robot kits are available for a couple of hundred bucks. 

None of these products are as sophisticated as the kinds of products the Army is considering, of course, but putting simpler versions of these technologies in the hands of soldiers today would likely significantly improve the Army’s odds of being able to cross Moore’s chasm between visionary thinking and pragmatic application in the future.

How and where should the Army implement this effort to familiarize the force with the future? Fortunately, the Army has a good place, a good concept, and some prototypes already in place--at the library. The Army library system contains over 170 libraries worldwide. While many people continue to think of libraries as silent spaces full of dusty books, the modern library has been re-imagined as a place not only for knowledge acquisition but also as tech centers for communities.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the “makerspaces” that are increasingly woven into the fabric of modern libraries. Typically offering access to equipment that, while relatively inexpensive, is outside the budget of most households, or to technology that is best first experienced in a hands-on, peer learning environment, makerspaces allow users to try out new technologies and processes at the user’s own pace and according to the user’s own interest. 

3D printers, laser cutters, video and podcasting equipment are often combined in these makerspaces with more sophisticated traditional equipment such as high end, programmable sewing machines. Most times, however, the makerspace has been tailored by the local librarians to meet the needs of the population that the library serves. Indeed, the Army already has at least three examples of makerspaces in its library system, the Barr Memorial Library at Fort Knox, the Mickelsen Community Library at Fort Bliss and The Forge at the US Army War College.

Imagine being able to go to the post library and check out an autonomous drone for the weekend? Or to sit down and 3D print relief maps of the terrain you were going to cover on your next hike? Understanding the basics of these new technologies will not only make the future force more comfortable with them but also allow soldiers to think more robustly about how to employ these technologies to the Army’s advantage.

While the cost of such a venture would be reasonable, acquiring the funding for any effort on the scale of the whole Army cannot be taken for granted. More challenging, perhaps, would be the process of repurposing the space, training staff, and rolling out the initiative. 

But what is the alternative? To the extent that the Army, as the 2019 People Strategy outlines, needs people at all levels “who add value and increase productivity through creative thinking and innovation,” it seems imperative that the Army also have a whole-of-army approach to innovation. To fail to do so risks falling into Moore’s chasm, where the best laid plans of the visionaries and early adopters fall victim to unprepared pragmatists that will always make up the bulk of the Army.