Inside the Department of Defense’s self-assessment pilot to measure innovation readiness

It’s no secret that the Department of Defense has struggled to scale innovation. Known as the Valley of Death, the challenge is that the department often fails to expand and build innovative pilots into larger production contracts. A new program operated by the Defense Aquisition University wants to attempt to solve that by wrapping its arms around the department’s innovation worfkorce readiness. Called Innovate to Win, the initiative is intended to help the DoD codify and measure the innovation readiness of the Defense Acquisition Workforce and, by extension, that of the whole DoD workforce. Dr. Marina Theodotou, the head of workforce innovation readiness for the Defense Acquisition University, and Christen Goulding, Director of Communications at DAU, join me now to discuss the program, its goals and how they hope to create a metric to measure innovation readiness. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.