Forging the Forge: Executing a Renewed Initiative in Concept Engineering at NASA JSC

Abstract

Have you ever brought up an idea to your group, organization or company, just to have someone respond “We've tried that before and it didn't work”? Or “We looked into that years ago and rejected it”? As if the further back someone had generated the original idea, the worse it was? Popular culture views the past as disposable, and that we must look forward to the future for innovation and big ideas. But the past is valuable. As Dr. John Lennox, a professor at Oxford University, writes, “New things are old things happening to new people.” Teams at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) started exploring ways to implement our vision statement of “Dare Unite Ex-plore”, a vision acknowledging the need to continually evolve to meet the demands of the future. Through brainstorming and benchmarking other NASA Centers, the authors proposed an”Innovation Team” to meet the vision to work with greater speed and agility, communicate effectively between organizations, improve innovation and increase workforce flexibility. However, when the idea was proposed, it was met with some skepticism given an analogous effort in a prior decade or two. This paper describes how the authors overcame these challenges to implement a collaborative, concurrent engineering framework tailored to JSC's needs. Our process to drive cultural change, the steps taken, and challenges encountered are discussed, including the aspects that were considered given JSC's operation-focused, Program-driven landscape. Modeled after rapid concept development teams like NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Innovation Foundry and NASA Glenn Research Center's Compass team, NASA JSC is laying the foundation of an innovation team called “The Forge”. This team is as much about getting employees tempered in the ways of innovative thinking as it is about refining design studies and hammering out proposals. The first two pilots of the teaming framework are described with initial results presented in terms of employee engagement and fostering innovation. We also describe the planned future work and next steps to continue to push the initiative forward. Building upon JSC's long heritage in human spaceflight programs and operations, we are forging a renewed emphasis to Dare to expand frontiers, Unite with our partners and Explore space to benefit humanity.