Navy Seeks ‘Extreme’ Blue-Sky Ideas

The Serendipity Collective is holding a highly unusual pitching event for new ideas: the crazier the better, and there is no need for the traditional business case or even a definite application. Instead, they are looking for “blue sky thinking in the absolute extreme.” This radical approach comes not from a billionaire tech bro but from a consortium involving U.S. military.

“By bringing eclectic minds together and letting them ideate without any constraint, we’re hoping to discover and support early innovations that will shape the world for decades to come,” says Scott Walper, Science Director at the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global.

The Collective is a partnership between ONR Global is collaborating and the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation SPRIND. It will make grants of $50,000 to up to five teams at the pitching event held in Berlin in May to cover a one-year development period.

Modern research in both industry and government laboratories tends to be laser-focused on achieving specific results towards an identified goal, and steadfastly refusing to be drawn down any interesting side paths that research may throw up. This approach may be efficient when you have a particular destination in mind, but misses out on serendipity, defined as finding something valuable when you were not looking for it.

Classic inventions resulting from serendipity include the Post-It note (from an unsuccessful glue that would not stay stuck), Velcro fastening (a Swiss electrical engineer wondered why burrs kept sticking to his dog) and Teflon (not a NASA product, but a surprise offshoot of research into refrigerants).

Perhaps closer to the Serendipity Collective’s heart, radar scientist Percy Spencer was standing next to a radar magnetron tube in 1945 and found it had melted the chocolate bar in his pocket. Spencer, known for his radar work for the U.S. Navy in WWII, wondered if radio waves could be used to cook food. He placed some popcorn kernels in front of the tube and watched the results…and the first commercial microwave oven reached the market just two years later. Nobody knew they wanted a microwave oven before it was invented, but it became an essential part of the modern kitchen.

To qualify for the event teams must be multidisciplinary, “ideally including at least one scientist, engineer, humanities/social sciences expert, and artist” – although teams do not have to be complete at the time of pitching. The mixture of diverse talents is intended to encourage creative thinking.

“Scientists and engineers are sometimes constrained by the boundaries we set ourselves, artists are able to dream bigger,” Patrick Rose, Innovation Manager at SPRIND and co-creator of the Serendipity Collective, told me. “What we wanted to do was to put them together and figure out how to enable serendipity.”

While not every individual can be Leonardo da Vinci, a team can include members sharing his interests in science, engineering and art. Naturally this is going to throw up some fairly wild ideas – how is the collective going to pick the winners?

“The team doing the evaluation has the skills to understand and accept outrageous ideas, put them in context and recognize their potential,” says Rose. “You can have ten teams pitch you the same idea, but only one of them will have the vision, and it’s possible to recognize that vision.”

The collective’s commitment to encouraging far-out ideas includes inviting science fiction writer Matthew de Abaitua to offer his perspective into the future at the event.

The actual success rate from the ideas is likely to be low; a high success rate would be a sign that the ideas are not ambitious enough. Rose says that 99% may not go very far, but in the process of development they should generate further ideas to drive the next iteration of innovations. This leads to another question though: if failure is expected, how do you evaluate the teams’ performance at the end of the year.

“We don’t want them to solve a problem,” says Rose. “But the research should come up with lessons learned, finding alternatives and making progress, not necessarily coming out the way the researcher envisaged, but developing a way forward with progress that can be measured.”

At end of year, Rose says there will be opportunities for the continued funding of ideas that show potential.

“ONR Global and SPRIND both have other funding mechanisms. If we see ideas that are cool, that have lots of potential, we’re not going to leave them hanging,“ says Rose.

Rose would like to see this become an annual event, and one that attracts a larger pool of sponsors who see the value of serendipity over aiming for the next small incremental advance.

“We want to incorporate other ideas and attract other funders,” says Rose. “We hope it will become a movement to attract truly big dreams and blue-sky thinkers that can’t find funding elsewhere.”

The Serendipity Collective is based on the principle that that truly disruptive technologies will offer solutions to problems that humanity has yet to recognize, and create demand where none currently exists. Can serendipity be deliberately cultivated? Maybe we will know the answer to that after the event in May.

And if you are one of those people with a crazy, brilliant idea, the deadline for applications is 18^th March.