7.Steve Rader: Open Innovation at NASA

Steve Rader serves as the Program Manager of NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) and the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), which are working to infuse challenge and crowdsourcing innovation approaches at NASA and across the federal government. CoECI focuses on the study and use of curated, crowdsourcing communities that utilize prize and challenge-based methods to deliver innovative solutions for NASA and the U.S. government. 

In 2015, Steve was named as one of 20 Challenge Mentors for U.S. Government Services Administration’s (GSA) Prizes and Challenges government-wide community of practice. Steve has worked with various projects and organizations to develop and execute over 100 different challenges. He speaks regularly about NASA’s work in crowd-based challenges and the future of work both publicly and internally to the NASA workforce to promote the use of open innovation tools.

Steve has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Rice University and has worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for 33 years. Prior to joining CoECI/NTL, Steve worked in mission control, flight software development for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, command and control systems development for the X-38, and led the Command, Control, Communications, & Information (C3I) architecture definition for the Constellation Program.

To see how organizations like NASA have successfully used Wazoku's platform to solve complex problems, check out their customer stories on forecasting solar events and improving the performance of Kevlar. If you’d like to speak with someone about starting a challenge of your own or learn more about how Wazoku can help you, request a demo here. 

Brought to you by The Infinite Loop – Where Ideas Evolve, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation Never Stops.

Transcript

Welcome to today's episode of the Total Innovation Podcast. 

Meet Steve Rader: NASA's Open Innovation Leader

Today we have the privilege of hosting a true trailblazer in the world of open innovation, open talent, and crowdsourcing, Steve Rader. Steve is the Program Manager for the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at NASA, where he spearheads revolutionary approaches to solving some of the most complex challenges in aerospace and beyond.

With a career dedicated to leveraging the power of global collaboration, Steve has been instrumental in harnessing the collective intelligence of diverse crowds to drive groundbreaking solutions. From space missions to cutting edge technological advancements, his work is reshaping the way we think about innovation. 

So join us as we dive into Steve's journey, exploring the fascinating project that he's led and uncover his insights into the future of collaborative problem solving. Get ready to be inspired by the manage, not just reaching for the stars, but bringing them closer through the power of innovation.

Welcome, Steve.  Oh, thanks. It's great to be here.  So  the purpose of this podcast is to try and get a bit of a deep dive into the how, right? 

Understanding NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation

For folks that don't know that maybe you could just quickly introduce the NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. Coasey, I think is the, uh, Sure, sure. 

Yeah, cozy. It's a, it's a center of excellence. It's been around since about 2011. Uh, and it, it came about really at the request of the white house office of science and technology policy. Um, because the administration saw the value and open innovation and NASA had started some pilots, but the center of excellence, uh, is really. 

Built to help both NASA and any federal agency around the US government to help understand what open innovation is to advance it and then provide that as a service, uh, to all those organizations so that they can put into practice the use of open innovation. And more recently. Open talent. So the use of platform based crowds to help find the technologies, the expertise, the ideas that we can't necessarily get just from within our own organizations. 

You guys have built a capability for NASA, but also for the wider federal government as well over the course of what, just over a decade or so,  which is pretty incredible.  Can you talk a little bit around. 

Steve Rader's Journey into Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation

So, uh, can you tell us a little bit about your personal motivation like your body about your background and what led you there and how you  found yourself in this exciting, challenging space? 

You know, it's interesting, back in 20, uh, 10, I read Jeff Howell's book, uh, crowdsourcing. And once I read that book, I immediately knew this, this is an important development in the world. This, this tapping into human diversity, uh, and innovation in a way that we haven't been able to up to now is gonna be a game changer.

And so, uh. I kind of got out there and joined a bunch of crowds, tried to understand what was going on. Uh, and then once, uh, NASA stood up the Center of Excellence, uh, and they had an opening, I moved over into that. The motivation for me is, um,  and it's funny because this has kind of evolved over time because I started with, wow, open innovation is really cool and can do some neat things.

But then I, I kind of took a step back a few years into it and, Started thinking about, well, why is this such an important tool? 

The Importance of Open Innovation in Today's Technological Landscape

And what I came up with, and I think it's, it's something we all know, but, but don't necessarily reflect on as much as we probably should, is that the pace and volume of change that we're seeing in the technological landscape is.

Just overwhelming I call it the tsunami of technology and have a whole bunch of data around  how big this this development cycle isn't how this compression of change is really changing the way organizations have to react  and it's really brought a new kind of phenomenon in technological development where.

There is so much going on in so many different disciplines using kind of building block technologies like 3D printing and machine learning and AI, uh, and different software tools and automation robotics that you're getting parallel development in lots of different industries.  To the point that it's causing disruptions because you can't monitor all the technology development that's going on and you can't possibly keep track of all of the intersections between  industries and so  it's not uncommon that a technology or a solution will kind of suddenly emerge onto the scene where it's coming from say mining and suddenly in this new.

New industry and it's fully formed and developed much more rapidly than than other technologies were used to see it developing and coming  out of the lab  and I truly, truly believe that open innovation is one of the only tools that helps you find those technologies, those experts, those, those ideas that that are out there as latent solutions, um, because. 

You can't just Google the latest and greatest tech. You can't just Google this intersection of need and solutions that are out there in these different industries. They use different jargon. They're addressing different problems. And it's this very abstract problem. And it turns out the open innovation is the unique tool.

It is that special tool that is shown over and over and over to be really good at that. And so the why for me is. This is a mandatory tool for organizations to leverage, uh, to kind of hedge against that change rate and that volume of technology that that's potentially disruptive for them, uh, in ways that that are really creative and I've just seen it work over and over.

So the why has built for me as we've had more and more successes. I was just looking today. We're we're almost to 850 projects that we've done over the years. And, You know, the success rate is like 95%. And when you're, you're seeing that many good results come out of a methodology and out of an industry, you, you, you get pretty convinced that it's, it's an important piece.

Challenges and Successes in Implementing Open Innovation at NASA

And so internally to NASA, I think if we're going to stay relevant and competitive in the world of space exploration, and, you know, there's more competition now with governments and commercial than ever before.  That, that's an important thing that I want to bring to NASA and the federal government is we have to stay relevant and competitive.

And so we need to train up everyone on how to use these tools and how to access them. 

Looking back after 850 years, congratulations. It's probably, you know, the biggest. Um, single deployments of open innovation, open talent challenges anywhere, right? You know, like there's a platform perspective. We've also done many more, but representing a variety of different industries. And I know our relationship goes back to some of those early days with your with your innocentive pieces.

But that's where the power of 2020 hindsight, right? You've now got the evidence, you know, it works. You've got the stats and the data points outside of the fact that the White House basically called and said, we want to do this, which obviously is not an everyday occurrence in most organizations. Um, and there's a slightly different mandates therefore to.

To get on and do it. Although I suspect doing it wasn't that well defined back then either, right? It was, you know, some some element of bringing the outside in in some way, shape or form. 

Early Foundations and Evolution of Open Innovation at NASA

What did that early foundation setting look like? And maybe you might want to apply that a bit if you can to a 2024 context rather than 2011.

But still, how would you think about that?  Yeah, I think it was Uh, not very clean. It was very messy, right? So, uh, if you, if for those have gone through Harvard business schools courses that they actually teach a case study called Houston, we have a problem, which is a case study of NASA's failure in open innovation.

Uh, it's the rejection of open innovation because, uh, Jeff Davis, when he, he had such success in the pilots with incentive and you guys, uh, early on, uh, He turned around and said, let's all go use this. And all the scientists and engineers were like, Hey, wait a second. We're the experts. We're, we don't want to go take the best part of our job and outsource it.

This is what you pay us for. And we've seen that pattern over and over, but that helped to inform us, uh, really on how to talk to our workforce about what these tools are. Uh, and really couch them not as a replacement for innovation, but as finding the best starting point for innovation, because if you if you're going to go innovate, you need the best ideas and technologies and experts to inform that and everyone knows that.

They just don't know necessarily that, that, uh, simple Google searches and some conferences don't do that for you anymore. Right? So, so we, we had to pivot there. 

Building Internal Platforms and Overcoming Resistance

I think we had to build some credibility within the agency as well with the internal platform. So we started with NASA at work, which was the innocent of platform initially.

And we've kind of migrated to that platform to what we call NASA spark now.  But, you know, we built that from just a few thousand employees up to about 30, 000 employees now, where most of the workforce engages, uh, with innovation using that platform. And it's a great way to kind of, uh, find challenges to find the experts within the agency.

And I think for organizations starting an open innovation, an internal platform is kind of a safe place to go do that. But we also learned very early on from other organizations. There are significant pitfalls. If you, if you grab that, uh, and do a little innovation theater where you're not really serious and you do kind of broad challenges to just give us your best ideas with no intention of actually going and doing anything and learning those lessons from other organizations really helped us to build an effective, uh, internal tool there.

And then I think the other thing, Okay. Was that that we figured out over the first few years that this was a growing and dynamic landscape of an industry, uh, lots of different communities and platforms were being developed somewhere were really good. Some were not so great and some were very specialized.

Some were very broad and they took advantage of. Platform based curated crowds in very different ways, right? Top coder does a whole series of challenges to develop software. Whereas you guys do more traditional challenges, but you have several flavors from ideation all the way to. To the to the implementation of prototypes and so we were seeing all these different models and all these different ways of doing things and we think wow  government it's so hard to just have a single contract right it takes like a year to put a contract in place what can we do to kind of.

Leveraging Multi-Vendor Contracts for Innovation

Facilitate  getting the best of class and so one of the things we did that I think was one of the best innovations we did early on in about 2015  was we put together what we call a multi vendor  contract which is we we went out and solicited as many. Crowds that we thought could meet our basic threshold and the first time we did that, we had 10 right?

You guys were part of that, right? We had that 10 different platforms that each had a different way of doing this and then we competed task orders, right? And we basically, uh, Yeah. Yeah. Took different problems and implemented that using both competes authority, which is kind of a governmental authority to run for NASA to run challenges, but also procurement authority, which basically allows us to subcontract our problem solving to companies like was oku or like top coder to say, go.

And you go develop the solution and they turn around and run a challenge with their crowd.  Those innovations in procurement have been really instrumental because now we're on the second  version of that contract. We now have 32 different platforms, which if you add up all the crowds is like 200  million people worldwide.

It's just phenomenal. And, you know, we're about to come out with the third rendition of that, uh, which will, uh, I can't really talk about, but we'll continue this, this idea of, uh, creating really an ecosystem of  curated crowds that we can tap into. And in fact, we've expanded it, not just to open innovation, but to the new trend of open talent, where we're noticing that.

Experts aren't where you expect them to be in and you can actually find them via some of these curated platforms, uh, in a much more streamlined way. So we're trying to prototype and understand what that looks like. And that's included in that contract now. So that's kind of how we moved through that early time until we are where we are now.

And a lot of the same still applies. It's still a dynamic marketplace. We're still watching things evolve, uh, even in 2024. 

Integrating Open Innovation into NASA's Core Processes

Do you feel like you've overcome that resistance and change management piece now where this is a part of the fabric of the way things work that people generally understand? I often, I've often told people, you know, when they say, but we have brilliant people internally, I say, you know, NASA has rocket scientists and it's really embraced open talents and open innovation, right?

So I'm sure that that was a tough audience to convince that.  kind of quasi non experts could do something, you know, differently, better arguably, um, than, than, than the highly qualified experts that's, you know, that's, that's their entire identity and raison d'etre in life. So,  yeah, well, I would say  for one, you know, We've been successful, uh, in a lot of things, but I would say there are still a large number of people at NASA that don't even know our program exists, right?

We are not there into the 100%.  Everyone knows that everyone uses it and we're working hard on that. We have a new innovation academy where we're, we're trying to spread the word. Create mavens throughout the organization that know how these tools work and can can help. And I would say any, any organization would be naive to think that that resistance isn't always latent leave there, right?

Because, uh, it's. It's until someone uses it and understands the tool, there's always these questions and you always want to be, uh, careful in the way you talk about open innovation, because if it is sense that this is a replacement for their ability to innovate. That you will get an unconscious resistance, right?

Um, and I think it's important, even in the way we talk about it, like the way you were talking about, then you know that our experts don't we have great experts and they are really are the experts what we're tapping into an open innovation isn't like a lack of their intelligence or a lack of their creativity or lack of their innovation.

It is simply. Tapping into knowledge of technologies or some sort of cross pollination between disciplines or industries that is almost impossible to detect on your own, right? That you remain blind to simply because you are the expert within your field working within your field, you can't possibly know what John Deere is doing over here or what, you know, some mining industry is doing over here.

And yet those, those technologies, if somebody has the right insights can say, Hey, look, You can actually use this in what you're doing. I would say to our domain  experts have the same problem that every industry's experts have. And that is  there are so many new technologies that are game changers that you cannot possibly be expert in all of them.

I use quantum sensing a lot because if you're monitoring what's happening in the quantum  world, if you will, With quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum computing,  the future is very different. Uh, and it's spread across, you know, kind of the sci fi part of that that's yet to come, but you can go buy  Tens if not hundreds of different quantum sensors commercially today, and a lot of people don't even know that exists in those quantum sensors work very differently and have very different capabilities than normal sensors.

Well, I don't care what kind of expert I'm talking to. Very few of those are quantum experts, right? And so. One of the things we say is, Hey, look, if you're looking for simply capability, trying to solve a problem, there are probably 20 different technologies out there that you cannot possibly be an expert in, but that could be the kind of thing that you really need.

Right? And it's, it's, it's. We see it all throughout every industry, right? Even in the IT industry, you know, we went from where you kind of understood all of it to now there's cybersecurity and cloud and all these kind of different pieces that make up the industry. So the more complex our industries get, the more you have kind of fragmented expertise and the more open innovation becomes an important tool to help you cross pollinate. 

That finding the best starting point piece really does underpin a lot of the thinking here then, right? Like you're trying to help make, I guess, accelerate, increase the breadth and the completeness of that, of that initial research piece. As you, as before you get into really kind of building and developing mode.

Just on that building and developing, though, I think one of the problem areas that people often start with is they'll get this, you know, a great idea or a set of great ideas in. And then what? How do you, how do you get to impact? How do you, you know, whatever impact looks like? So how, how does that, how's that managed inside, inside NASA?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's the same problem everyone has, right? There's the Valley of Death for, for startup type of efforts. Uh, we've got the full range of, you know, from discovery and inception of a technology or an idea all the way through implementation. And for NASA. You know, you've got stringent certifications that have to happen, uh, along the way, and you're kind of doing one off missions, which is really hard to build an industry off of sometimes, uh, for some of our solutions.

So we work as part of a portfolio within the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA. Which includes not just the discovery part, which I would say open innovation. The thing it's best at is discovery, right? Discovery of the ideas, technologies or experts that you just don't have any other way. But what that can bring you is.

A novel idea that's not been developed yet or a full blown technology that's sitting in another industry already to go. That's a very different technology readiness level that open innovation can bring in. And so what we find is prizes and challenges. This is open innovation component. We find ways to link it over to our.

Flight opportunities program, which is trying to move things up the ladder of technology readiness by kind of giving it test environments. They're more space like, or we work with  and the small business, uh, innovation grants that are given out as well as, um. Some of the contracts that that start to move things forward because we can sometimes discover entrepreneurs and innovators that might be best to help those contracts move forward in ways that you know a lot of these these government programs are kind of closed off or or it's it's hard for new folks to to discover them and understand how they work and we can provide a conduit into that we're finding more and more.

Um, the open innovation is a kind of a new acquisition model where you can actually set it up in the end, where if you're trying to especially get new teams and new, um, industries going that you can start with an ideation to find the players. And then with each prize, you're kind of funding forward. So it's a little bit higher risk for the government in that any winner can walk away with their prize money.

But if you have multiple phases, you can say, look.  We're the first 10 X amount of dollars and that prize money we can size to kind of fund their next phase, right? And so they can then go from idea to maybe a theoretical proof and then we can award a subset of those and whittle down to the subset that then we can say, okay, now we're looking for prototypes and the prize money that covers that and kind of help them with their funding of that prototype.

And we can just keep going. In fact, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, we're working a, a program with them where at the end of that program there will be operating spacecraft in space and they'll be buying the data from those spacecraft. But it is all done through a prizes and challenges facing, um, this is like a $30 million program.

And, and I think we're finding the flexibility we get with that and the way that that kind of helps business along, uh, to form. And, you know, in those, a lot of times. These companies keep their I. P. right and we're buying things back as the government. And I think that's a really healthy, uh, kind of way to go about this.

But we're really trying to link with these other programs to provide a better end to end development, you know, funnel, right? Because you're trying to get from lots of ideas that develop down into the actual implementation.  

Measuring Success and Overcoming Challenges in Open Innovation

Do you guys, do you think about measuring value or like the sort of ROI aspects of this, like how, how, how is that measured?

You guys have very long cycles and that's probably something.  But, you know, a PLC or equivalent may not may not necessarily have a listed company runs. It's so funny you say that because I happen to just be reading Michael Luric's design thinking and innovation metrics on that very topic. You know, we've been. 

We've been working on this for a long time, and I will say it is a really hard nut to crack, right? Especially on the early innovation stuff, because the solutions you get then have to get fitted into a design, and they get traded with other options, and sometimes they morph and change it. And by the time they get implemented, You know, sometimes it's very hard to say, oh, that was this idea.

We came out with a challenge back here. You know, there's just been a lot of change. Um, what we do  is we try to measure everything we can. So we measure how many participants we got, how many solutions we got. And then we try to look at those solutions and say, was that. Fully successful in the objectives we were trying to meet did it significantly advance us or was it simply an incremental advance or no advance we get some where there were no advance one of the ones we did early on for galactic cosmic rays. 

We got lots of submissions in on on kind of magnetic solutions that would kind of repel the  magnetic ray or the. Cosmic rays that we have outside of lower earth orbit. But none of the solutions we got in were better than our homegrown set, right? Cause that is a very specialty kind of thing, but we did want to see is somebody doing, but I will tell you, even though no one bested our folks that informed us, because I think we had something like seven of the 10 finalists were nuclear physicists from around the world who had all participated.

On the challenge and spent, you know, 40 to 80 hours kind of developing these mathematical solutions. And I think that's an important data point to see is, is, oh, our folks really are on the right path. Right? So, anyway,  how do you how do you engage subject matter experts?  In that, what does that process look like?

I think there's often fear around and what am I taking on here? There's the IP consideration. There's also the evaluation part of that. Yeah, part of it is, um, so we have a roadshow that we use. In fact, we've kind of backed off using it because a couple of years ago, we actually hit 100 challenges at once.

And we've kind of maintained that. But what that said to us is, oh, the word is out there. People are using us. Yeah. We, we actually need to now work on scaling our operations so we can handle the throughput of challenges, but, but in that roadshow, we kind of explain, you know, how this works, but then we don't just say, hey, look at this great set of tools, come and use these, uh, and give them really good rationale for why it's going to help them.

Uh, we show them the data and often this stuff is, is cost saving. So we'll always compare, uh, What they would have done if they hadn't used open innovation versus the cost to using our tools. And I think something like, let me just see the data here. 74 percent of the time we have cost savings and that average cost savings tends to be almost 50%, which that is a huge amount.

Right? So. We've spent about a hundred and twelve million dollars total on all of our challenges. We think we've saved close to one hundred and seventy million. That's that's a very good payback on this. Um, and so we try to capture those kinds of, of metrics that help us, um,  And then as we go through this, uh, we have team members and this is why the throughput is so important.

We have team members that help them every step of the way. So we don't just say go use open innovation. Best of luck to you. We actually provide them an advisor helps them formulate what their problem is, what those requirements are. Basically build the task order, do the contracting for them, get them matched up with a curated crowd that then can formulate the public challenge.

If that's what's needed or go find the expert. And then they, we kind of walk with them through this so that at no point do you.  Are they left alone with it? We're always helping them, helping them to understand their expectations, how to work it, make sure they're happy with what they get,  which I think on any new tool, that's often a mistake that's made with organizations is, hey, if I just tell you about a great tool, everyone's going to go off and use it.

And the barrier to entry on anything new is especially hard, especially when. Legal and communications and procurement are involved, right? Nobody likes to tilt at those windows and we've spent a lot of time making our center of excellence have a process that enables all of the scientists and engineers to have an easier time using those, uh, but it is still a sell.

You still have to sell that what we call the problem owners, uh, or the opportunity owners, the ones who can actually implement the solutions that you go to, uh, get. They're the important ones, which I'll just add on  one of the things we see a lot of organizations, uh, doing open innovation is they do it as a top down.

They say, here's 10 million dollars. We want 4 challenges to hit our major needs. There's nothing wrong with those programs. In fact, there's some really good things about that. Um, but what we learned early on was. That actually ends up having a voluntold SME or problem owner who's, who's like, why I was going down this path.

And now you want me to use a challenge and we find that if we can convince the problem owners, you need to use this tool as part of your core systems engineering process as part of your design process. This shouldn't be something that someone mandates and has to hand you. This is should you should budget for this.

We actually are cheaper than what you would normally do. So just use your existing budget, use open innovation to discover the elements of your trade study that you need to be focused on and potentially even more, and then we'll help you get farther, faster, and that has actually paid off because that's a very much a bottoms up approach rather than the top down.

Now, we at NASA still have some top down programs with centennial challenges, and we still get some funding where we'll go out on our. Our internal platform and say, Hey, who's got some challenges that they want to try? We have some funding and we'll match you up,  but we're trying to encourage every organization to budget some of their budget towards open innovation as simply one of their tools that they now have in their toolkit.

Yeah, build it more into the operational core, right? That's the, that's the ultimate, the ultimate piece for this, which kind of blows my mind with the amount of evidence there is of the efficacy, the, um, the cost effectiveness, call that ROI, if you will, for, you know, getting to faster maybes, if you want to put it like that with, you know, and that really does have resilience, um, and, and sort of, I guess, risk to a degree linked against it as well as in managing risk rather than bringing risk.

Um, Because you can't go more, more holistic than asking a global crowd and, you know, and validating those things. Well, it does sound like a little bit. I know we're running tight on time. So maybe a couple of quick questions for you. What are the resources, right? You know, you've spoken about the amount of things you're doing.

It sounds like there's a very big team against all of this. Is there, or what does the resourcing look like?  We're a pretty small team. We have about 12 of us. Uh, and in fact, we have a pilot right now. We're running, uh, with freelancers where we actually have a set of freelancers from Upwork through Ensemble who are helping us with, we have kind of, uh, pretty big spikes in our demand.

A lot of people come to us with end of year fiscal year money. And so our summers tend to be really busy, but other times this is less. And so we're trying to look at the dynamics and we're trying to understand.  The role of freelancers in the future economy. So we were piloting that, um, but I'll say, um,  we, we pretty much resource, you know, way that's that scalable.

So, for instance, other federal agencies, when we do work for them, part of the funds that they transfer to us to go.  Basically execute their challenges on our contract. A piece of that actually funds some of our team so that the more of those that we get in, the more we can grow that side of the team as needed.

And it doesn't take away from NASA resources on the NASA side. We basically, uh. Also tax them as they come. So they, they helped to, to fund our team and then our technology mission director, they fund our core and keep us going, uh, in general. So we have a nice steady, uh, amount of funding, but it's also built to scale.

So that as we get more projects in, we were able to get a few more resources. And we're currently using some of those resources to build up a digital workflow on Salesforce, where we can actually. Uh, more easily train new people on how to do this so that. As I mentioned, the Open Innovation Academy, we're training people to not just go back to their organization and find opportunities and recognize where this is a best fit tool, but also training them on how to use these kind of digital workflows to help  formulate the requirements and get them formulated in a way that we can get them contracted quickly.

And the hope there is the more people we get around the agency that can execute parts of our process, the more we can scale to where we can do two or 300 of these at a time and aren't limited to the about 100 that we're currently limited to.  Nice. Yeah, we should talk at some time around some of the work that we've, uh, we've done in there on that enablement from a digital perspective as well.

Future Directions and Scaling Open Innovation at NASA

So last thought, really, then from a closing thought, what is the what is the future look like? You know, you guys have done some incredible work. It's been. A decade or more, but, you know, to a degree, it feels like you, you still have some mountains to climb. And I guess, you know, or, or maybe in NASA sense, some, you know, some far off destinations to reach.

What does this look like? Yeah. Well, I mean, we want to make this a very valuable tool. So we're going to focus on where do we bring the most value, right? So for a while there, we were not Playing with things like graphics challenges and videos, and some of that is still valuable and still good, good value for the government.

But we want to focus on what are the main problems NASA have that are big  payoff if we solve right or or something that we can really show as value and track. So we're working on better ways to track value. But also, uh, STMD, the space technology mission director, we're, we're all working together to prioritize to make sure that we're putting the funding towards the highest priority pieces of, uh, NASA's mission.

So that's 1 focus. We're working, as I mentioned, on scaling through both digitization of our workflow, as well as, um, training people on how to do that. So that we can expand, I tell people it's, it's kind of like going from making a good hamburger. To trying to actually open 25 McDonald's where everyone in those 25 McDonald's can make a good hamburger that that process is a we're finding is hard and very hard.

How do you make sure that you can get more of this done with less overhead and do it in a way where the quality all stands up on the open talent side were really piloting a lot and trying to understand what is it  every time I try to peel it away from open innovation it comes right back because. It really is the, the experts that you still need to bring in, uh, sometimes to help you judge, sometimes to help you develop pieces of this, but the open talent piece is important.

But eventually I'd really like a piece of that to go to, to human resources, right? To be part of the human capital that, that NASA does as a regular thing. Um, we're working on, on ways to embed this in all of our procurements so that all of the NASA ecosystem, all Of contractors also uses open innovation, right?

So the Boeing's, the Lockheed's, the Jacobs that they see the value of this and are able to use it because they do the bulk of NASA's work. And then finally, we're probably going to have the next year. So we're going to open a little bit of a curated community of our own, where every time someone participates in a NASA challenge, we invite them to become part of the NASA family.

And in that we can provide them, you know, pointers to all the places we and platforms that we're running challenges, but we can also let them talk to each other and we can show them our education programs and show them our launches so that it's not just that they participate in some little NASA thing.

And then they feel disconnected from NASA. We want. them to feel connected with us. And we feel that the curated crowd model is a really great way to do that. And, uh, we're working with the, uh, uh, education office who's already started building pieces of that up and we're excited to see where that goes. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Well, an exciting vision and congrats on really being a pioneer in this space, right? You know, as, as I said, not everyone gets a call from the White House. You guys have I've had a lot of latitude, I think, to be able to really test some of these things and build, but you've used that latitude to build, as I said, an unparalleled capability here, I think, and, and I guess it's sobering to a degree to know that even with all of that, there's still a long way to go, but the evidence is there to support that, right?

So thank you very much, Steve, for sharing your incredible insights and your strategies and very openly and honestly, I think, um, with, with us today. For both problem solving and the role of open talents within all of that. Hope everyone listening to this has found it informative and useful. Uh, before we go, where can folk find you, Steve?

I know you've got a NASA hat and also you're very open about sharing this, but you do help others with this as well. So where can they find you? And the easiest place to find me on LinkedIn, if you just search it's NASA Steve Rader, you should be able to find me, uh, maybe even just Steve Rader. But, uh, I'm out there.

Feel free to connect to me and message. Happy to chat with anyone.  Great. Thank you very much. And thanks for everyone for listening. Before we go, don't forget to subscribe to the Total Innovation podcast on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode. We've got some amazing conversations lined up after Steve, including the amazing Stephen Shapiro with his latest book, Pivotal, where we'll be explaining the concept of innovating where you differentiate and you won't want to miss it.

So thank you for listening and we look forward to bringing you more insights and stories from the world of innovation. Until next time, here's to changing the world one idea at a time.