Navy moves to upsurge innovation challenges, hackathons

The Navy’s chief technology officer released a memo that outlines a new plan to help the department more widely adopt and host structured challenge events, like hackathons, that can speedily advance capability deployments across the sea service.

This new Structured Challenges Approach for Innovating and Optimizing is part of a broader initiative to promote and grow existing digital transformation-enabling practices — called agile centered design concepts — that are already resulting in small-scale wins in different Navy components, the department’s acting CTO Justin Fanelli told DefenseScoop after signing the May 24 memo, which was publicly released on Thursday.

Generally, structured challenges and hackathons refer to multi-day, high-intensity events at which many people are incentivized to come together to collectively and competitively write, engineer or improve computer programs and other assets at an accelerated pace.

According to Fanelli, such engagements are already changing warfare and how the military “fights” with data and software, by expediting adaptation to weapons systems and effects through leveraging tools like prizes and social benefits, and bringing the necessary people together to build and innovate.

In the new memo, the CTO points to a Navy command that recently “held an Innovation Olympics that challenged people to show how they were using Power BI, Power Apps, or Power Automation to innovate and improve everyday.” Those software products are developed by Microsoft.

Outside the Defense Department, allies like Ukraine and adversaries associated with Russia’s Wagner Group, and separately China, are hosting hackathons and prize competitions to accelerate tech innovations to enable their agendas, Fanelli told DefenseScoop.

The new five-page memo lays out the Navy’s overarching plan to foster and implement this “structured challenges approach.”