H/T The Tank at National Review Online.  People have asked me what exactly is this Excalibur R&D thing you are trying to create?  To many, I said it was a virtual think-tank because I had no other way to describe it.  Now, Michael Tanji writes a paper that fairly succinctly describes what we are trying to do here.  He even cites our friends at Small Wars Journal who are probably doing the most collaborative military analysis on the web, albeit aimed towards the study and discussion of irregular, guerilla, and small wars as their names suggests.

I really REALLY love this point from the paper: An apparently eminently qualified expert was never asked to participate in seminars in her subject area.  When she asked why she was being overlooked the reply was succinct and describes the problem:

• “But you’re not in DC.”

There you have it.  Just as the MSM will never give up their position in the world, “you can have this press pass back when you pry it from my cold dead hands!” (with apologies to Charlton Heston) the think tanks of DC stand at their podiums looking down at the commoners dispensing their commentary as if dispatches from Mt. Olympus. Meanwhile the technology of collaboration and innovation advances.  The reality is that we don’t have to assault the fort, only bypass it.  The only problem is that the only group and process that is operating at a slower pace than the think tanks are the federal government, especially the military acquisition process.  

The Federal Acquisition process is designed to be the slowest, most excruciatingly painful thing imaginable, to level out the playing field for bidders and it rewards lethargy, not battles it.  But it’s not just the acquisition process, it’s in the very thinking going on within defense circles.  Here’s a classic example.  In the past couple of days, Wired Magazine’s blog Danger Room wrote about two articles on the internets, the first how the Canadian military were fearful of troops posting too much personal information on Facebook here and a second piece where (apparently as reported) the Air Force is banning the surfing of blog sites. (Note, I couldn’t verify the article in Air Force Times so this may turn out to be premature) Then this piece in government exec online by Greg Grant (h/t Strata-sphere here) describes the morphing of Al Qaeda into an internet enabled force, away from their roots in the Afghan Arabs of the 80’s who fought the Soviets or the travelers who went to Afghanistan in the 90’s for training. They now exist apart from Bin Laden but they are hampered by a lack of a training area.

What’s it all mean?  We are still at the very beginnings of an information, collaboration, and innovation explosion.  You ignore it at great risk to your company, to your career, and your way of life.

As Mr. Tanji wrote in his paper:

• Ultimately however, the goal of Think Tank 2.0 is not to gain efficiencies; it is to take one more step towards putting the "public" back in public policymaking. In the long term – the think-tank-after-next – imagine that this business will further evolve to the point where a wide-range of participants will be able to effectively assemble ad hoc to apply their intellectual power for policymaking purposes. The end result would be a technology-enabled The Wisdom of Crowds capability – with emotion tempered by expertise and fellowship – that allows a population to have greater influence on the decisions that impact their lives.