Innovation For The Future

Innovation. Whether a new idea, an enhanced process or a modified tool, developing creative new solutions to work more efficiently and effectively will be a key factor in United Space Alliance’s future success.

“Developing and promoting a culture of innovation is critically important to honing our competitive edge in the human space flight marketplace,” said Loren Shriver, USA’s Chief Technology Officer and Director of Engineering and Integration. “Our ability to innovate combined with our skills and experience will be what sets us apart from our competition.”

As NASA moves forward with plans to develop new launch systems to support the International Space Station and return to the moon, the need for innovation in all aspects of the human space flight program is growing.

“In the various requests for information and requests for proposals for the new programs, there is a huge emphasis on being innovative to make space flight more technically sound and less costly than it is today,” Shriver said.

He added that companies that have a reputation for innovation and can bring those solutions to the table will be the leaders for the future.

“We are closely associated with a program that is growing old and is about to fly out in a couple of years,” Shriver said. “Additionally, the industry is coming into a design, development and testing phase, and we’re an operations company by choice. Some people could mistakenly think that just because we don’t design new vehicles, we can’t be innovative. They couldn’t be more wrong.

“There is a lot of innovation that goes into maintaining ground facilities and operating safely on the ground and during a mission,” he said. “The Space Shuttle is a hugely complicated vehicle, and you can’t continue to operate it successfully without being innovative in your approach to doing the work.”

Still, according to Shriver, USA must work to sustain a culture throughout the company that embraces and fosters creativity and innovation and that employs technology to improve operations.

Over the past year, USA has taken several critical steps to build and promote a culture of innovation. The first step – and an action consistent with several Vision USA team recommendations – was to establish the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) position as an executive-level post reporting directly to the Chief Executive Officer. Shriver was named to that position in 2006.

“A CTO gives us executive-level sponsorship for actions and activities that drive innovation and technology development and that promote a culture that allows people to think and be creative,” he said.

One of Shriver’s first actions as the CTO was to create the Technology Integration Panel (TIP) and the Technology Innovation Office (TIO) as part of the overall systematic approach to foster technology development.

The TIP is organized primarily to identify and review new technology ideas and proactively identify future technology needs for both USA and its customers.

During the past few months, the TIP has been revamping its membership, replacing members who are no longer able to participate with qualified candidates who are interested in expanding USA’s technological capabilities, broadcasting USA’s technology strategy and educating TIP members on the importance of reporting contract-developed innovations.

“Our strategy is to use the TIP members to recommend contract-developed innovations for future business applications at USA,” Shriver said.

Headed by Leslie Roche, the TIO was also formed as a direct result and recommendation from Vision USA. Its role is to assist in strategic technology planning and to develop an enterprise technology management system to help identify innovative ideas that support the company’s core competencies and strategic plan and vision.

“The TIO will help establish a roadmap for technology development and manage the portfolio of technologies we need to be looking at to better position us for the future,” Shriver said.

Roche said the TIO has three tasks.

“The TIO’s most visible task is to ensure that contract-developed technologies are reported to our customer,” she said. “Almost every one of USA’s current contracts includes a technology reporting requirement. What this means is that every innovation we develop under contract must be reported to the customer.”

The TIO’s other responsibilities are educating the workforce on the importance of reporting technological innovations and developing technological partnerships with industry, academia and custom ers that showcase and demonstrate USA’s technologically capable workforce. Those partnerships currently include the Space Alliance T echnology Outreach Program (SATOP) and Dual Use Academic Liaison (DUAL) program.

SATOP is a cooperative program to help small businesses apply the technical expertise derived from the space program. Supported by an alliance of 45 space industry and academic partners, it is a free service designed to aid in the transfer of space technology to the private sector by assisting small businesses solve their technology challenges.

USA engineers work with small businesses to develop solutions for both simple and complex business challenges. While the SATOP projects are largely unrelated to human space flight, they serve to publicly demonstrate the ability of USA
employees to think and develop solutions that address real issues, Roche said.

The DUAL program seeks to enhance the capabilities of human space flight operations through collaboration between USA and academia. The program provides university faculty members, seniors, masters and doctoral students the opportunity to work advanced technology projects in direct association with NASA Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center under the Space Program Operations Contract.

The program also affords educators and educational institutions the opportunity to partner with USA for research and development grants from the National Science Foundation or other matching fund organizations.

“When we participate in SATOP and DUAL, we are demonstrating USA’s competence and strength as an innovative organization,” Roche said. “Our customers look to these endeavors as examples of USA’s ability to develop innovative ideas and concepts.”

Roche summarizes the purpose of the TIO as that of “harnessing the innovative capability of our employees to help us to win new contracts and business that will take us beyond Shuttle, to the moon and beyond.”

“We have a highly innovative workforce that develops new ideas, innovations and concepts on a daily basis,” she said. “Our job is to make sure that the capabilities of our workforce are advertised and understood in the technical community.”

Shriver asserts that USA has always been an innovative company and agrees that it must do a better job of “advertising” its innovation in the future.

“Because we’re operators, we tend to do what we think is necessary to get the job done, and we don’t think much about whether it was innovative or not,” he said. “If you don’t think of it as innovative, the rest of the world won’t either.

“Sometimes, when you’re outside looking in, it’s hard to judge operations that go smoothly. People think there’s not a lot of innovation there, but actually the opposite is true. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation throughout the whole operations cycle. We have to become better at recognizing and encouraging that kind of day-to-day innovation and at helping others understand it.”

As USA moves toward the future, innovation must be demonstrated in both space flight operations and in conducting business.

“Innovation is taking an idea, a piece of equipment or a thought and creating a new way to use it differently or improve it,” Shriver said. “It’s thinking of ways to do something differently. It’s embracing a new way of doing things. Innovation is always an important part of any endeavor.”

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