Jun 23, 2024
Bio: Pete Newell
Pete Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the government and other large organizations compete and drive growth.
He is the CEO of BMNT, an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage tech accelerator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Founded in Silicon Valley, BMNT has offices in Palo Alto, Washington DC, Austin, London, and Canberra. BMNT uses a framework, called H4X®, to drive innovation at speed. H4X® is an adaptation of the problem curation techniques honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the best practices employed by successful Silicon Valley startups. The result is a disciplined, evidence-based, data-driven process for connecting innovation activities into an accountable system that delivers solutions and overcome obstacles to innovation.
Pete is a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program taught at 47+ universities in the U.S., as well as universities in the UK and Australia. H4D® focuses on solving national security problems. It has in turned created a series of sister courses – Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Local and others – that use the H4X® framework to solve critical real-world problems while providing students with a platform to gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete continues to advise and teach the original H4D® course at Stanford University with Steve Blank. In addition, Pete is Co-Founder and Board Director of The Common Mission Project, the 501c3 non-profit responsible for creating an international network of mission-driven entrepreneurs, including through programs like H4D®.
Prior to joining BMNT, Pete served as the Director of the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF). Reporting directly to the senior leadership of the Army, he was charged with rapidly finding, integrating, and employing solutions to emerging problems faced by Soldiers on the battlefield.
From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the REF in the investment of over $1.4B in efforts designed to counter the effects of improvised explosive devices, reduce small units exposure to suicide bombers and rocket attacks and to reduce their reliance on long resupply chains. He was responsible for the Army’s first deployment of mobile manufacturing labs as well as the use of smart phones merged with tactical radio networks.
Pete retired from the US Army as a Colonel in 2013. During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing special operations, combat, and peace support operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Army Ranger who has received numerous awards to include the Silver Star and Presidential Unit Citation.
Pete holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS from the National Defense University and advanced certificates from the MIT Sloan School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Bio: Dr Alison Hawks
Dr. Alison Hawks is one of the leading experts advancing public sector innovation. A researcher and academic-turned-entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and CEO of BMNT, Ltd., the innovation company that is changing how public sector innovation happens; and Chair of the Common Mission Project UK, BMNT’s charitable partner that guides mission-driven entrepreneurial education in the UK.
Dr. Hawks co-founded BMNT Ltd with (Ret) Col Pete Newell, the CEO of BMNT, Inc., in 2019 to bring BMNT’s proven innovation approach to the UK market. Under her leadership BMNT has become a trusted innovation partner across all single Services of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and the national security community. She has also helped change how real-world government challenges are addressed in the UK, launching the “Hacking for” academic programmes created in the U.S. These courses that teach university students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques to solve problems alongside government at startup speed. As a result of her efforts, 14 UK universities are offering Hacking for the Ministry of Defence, Hacking for Sustainability and Hacking for Police. More than 480 students have taken these courses, addressing 103 real-world challenges.
Dr. Hawks teaches mission-driven entrepreneurship at King’s College London, Department of War Studies and at Imperial College London’s Institute of Security Science and Technology. She was named the Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards in 2022. She serves on the Board of Directors of BMNT, leading development of BMNT’s innovation education programs while also guiding the integration of BMNT’s rapidly expanding international presence.
She was previously Director of Research at the Section 809 Panel, a U.S. Congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was also an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, as well as King’s College London, Department of Defence Studies where she taught strategy, policy and operations in professional military education.
Dr. Hawks’ doctoral thesis was in military sociology. She received her Ph.D from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She has multiple peer reviewed publications on her research.
Interview Highlights
03:50 BMNT
06:20 Serendipity
10:00 Saying yes to the uncomfortable
11:20 Leadership
15:00 Developing a thick skin
20:00 Lessons of an entrepreneur
22:00 Stakeholder success
25:00 Solving problems at speed and at scale
28:00 The innovation pipeline
29:30 Resistance is rational
34:00 Problem curation
38:00 Dual use investments
43:00 Accelerating change
47:00 AUKUS
52:20 AI
Contact Information
· LinkedIn: Ali Hawks on LinkedIn
· LinkedIn Peter Newell on LinkedIn
· Website: The Common Mission Project UK
· Website: BMNT US
· Website: BMNT UK
Books & Resources
· Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less: Robert Sutton, Robert , Huggy Rao
· Impromptu : Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman
· The Friction Project - Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao
Episode Transcript
Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.
Ula Ojiaku
My guests for this episode are Pete Newell and Ali Hawks. Pete Newell is the CEO and Co-founder of BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest problems facing the Department of Defense and Intelligence community.
Ali Hawks is CEO of BMNT in the UK and also a Co-founder of BMNT in the UK. In addition to this, she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Common Mission Project, and she Co-founded the Common Mission Project in 2019 and drove its growth as a Startup charity in the UK. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Pete and Ali, I found it very insightful and I'm sure you would as well.
Pete, thank you Ali, thank you so much for being with us on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here.
Pete Newell
Thanks so much for the invite.
Ali Hawks
Yeah. Thank you for having us.
Ula Ojiaku
Right, this is the second time ever in the history of my podcast that I'm having two people, two guests. The first time was fun, and I know this one would be as well, and informative. I always start with asking my guests to tell us a bit about themselves. So your background, any memorable happenings that shaped you into the person you are today?
Pete Newell
So I'm a retired army officer. I enlisted when I was 18 and was commissioned when I left college in the mid 80s. I spent most of my career as an Infantryman in tactical units. I spent a great bit of time in the Middle East and other war zones. Towards the end of my career, I ended up as the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force, which is essentially the Skunk Works that was stood up at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to accelerate technology to solve problems that were emerging on the battlefield, that weren't part of something else, somewhere else.
And in that three-year journey, it probably exposed me to first and foremost, the speed at which new problems are presenting themselves, not just on the battlefield, but in the rest of the world. It exposed me to the speed at which technology is changing, being adopted and then being adapted for other purposes. So it's almost like chasing technology as it changes is a whole new sport, and it exposed me to the challenges of large bureaucratic organisations and their inability to keep up with the speed of the changes in order to remain competitive, whether it was on the battlefield or in the commercial markets or something like that. Those epiphanies really drove, first, my decision to retire from the military, because I became addicted to solving that problem, and second, drove the impetus to launch BMNT in 2013. And in fact, you are right square in the middle of our 10th anniversary of being a company. So it really is, I think, a big deal because we started with four people on a driveway in Palo Alto, California, now we're a global company with multiple companies and are grateful, but that's the history of how we got started.
Ula Ojiaku
Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, and it's an impressive background and story. Ali, what about you?
Ali Hawks
So, my background, a little bit different than Pete's, by training I was an academic, so my training and my PhD was in military sociology. I was really interested in understanding people's experiences in the armed forces, both in the US and the UK. That is what my PhD was focused around, my thesis, and I went on to be an academic at King's College London here in the UK. I've also been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. But it wasn't until I then took a job with the US DoD, in something called a Congressional Advisory Panel called the Section 809 Panel, which was tasked with overhauling all of defense acquisition, and that's where Pete and I met. I think one of those formative experiences in my career was meeting Pete and going to the non-profit that Pete started and spun out of BMNT, it’s called the Common Mission Project with a really big program, Hacking for Defense, and Steve Blank also Co-founded that as you know, and Joe Felter. I went to an educator course for this program in Fort Belvoir as a part of my job to understand, could we take these types of methods and put them into congressional legislation or DoD regulation as a way to change how people think about problems? And when I met Pete, it was the intersection of all of the things that I really love, academia, entrepreneurship, defense and national security. I went up to Pete and pitched him and said, I want to take this back to the UK and launch it. That was the start of what has been thousands of conversations about the value that we can add both in the US and the UK. I worked in some law firms before I did my Master's and my PhD, but mainly my career has been in academia.
Ula Ojiaku
Wow. Thanks for sharing. And would you say it was serendipity that made your paths to cross and how are you finding the journey so far?
Ali Hawks
I think, yes, I think it's serendipity. I have a really different life journey than Pete. And I think in my career at the time when I met Pete, I hadn't really found what it is, what I felt like my purpose should be, or hadn't really found passion or joy in my work to that day. I found things I loved, I loved academia and I love teaching, but it just still didn't hit all of those things that you kind of get up every day and are like, this is what I’m meant to do. And I had done a lot of work on reflecting of what that would feel like and what that would look like and the elements it had to have.
So by the time I met Pete, it was almost as if someone was flashing a huge sign at me saying, don't miss your turn, this is your turn. So I think serendipity, but also really understanding what it is that I wanted to do and the type of people I wanted to work with and the journey so far. I'll hand over to Pete in a second, but it's been nothing short of incredible. Pete has an amazing reputation, but as a business partner and as a leader, he allows people to truly learn, experiment, make mistakes, and he pulls everyone along by building confidence and empowering people that work for him. So in terms of kind of coming from academia and becoming a researcher turned entrepreneur, it's been the most formative experience of my career. Being able to work along Pete is like being able to work alongside that kind of guide or that guru, and you're like, wow, I can't believe I get to talk to this person every week and learn from them and be in business with them. So that's how it's going for me. Pete, how's it going for you?
Pete Newell
You know, Steve Blank and I had a long conversation about serendipity when he and I met 2015 and here's my advice in serendipity. It really is if you have an active curiosity and a willingness to say yes to things that you wouldn't normally, and you're not adverse to taking risk, the chances of serendipity smacking like lightning greatly go up. And then I go back to my first trip to Stanford University in 2011. Well, I was still a military officer and saying yes to a number of things that people asked me to do, and just one conversation after another led to a meeting with two guys who were Stanford graduate school instructors who were writing a book. Those two decided to write a chapter in that book about the work I was doing at the Rapid Equipment Force. Now, when Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton decided to write a book and hire a case study writer who spent six months digging into your life, you learn all kinds of things about yourself and about the world, and when that's followed by a chance coffee with Steve Blank, who had no idea who I was, and I had no idea who he was, that 15-minute coffee turned into a four-hour discussion between the two of us. I typically would not have been at the Fort Belvoir thing that Ali was at, and I think our meeting was very brief, but it was, I think, six months later when I found her in the library at Georgetown University at some social event and we both decided that we wanted her to do something, and we wanted to do something in the UK, and we wanted to see something between allied countries come together. There was no strategy or grand business development, there was nothing that drove those conversations. It was simply in the spur of the moment, the curiosity takes over and you start to say I can see where this might work.
Now, Ali will be the first to tell you, it has not been easy, but it has been a privilege to work with her and to continue to work between the two governments and the countries to see absolutely brilliant things done. And so I just say, I come back to, it's that curiosity connected with the desire to, the willingness to accept a little bit of risk, but learning how to say yes to things that you're uncomfortable with and digging just a little bit more. That opens up that opportunity so much more.
Ula Ojiaku
I could see, it's evident to me the way Ali was talking about working with you, Pete, and your leadership, I'm wondering, could there have been anything about your military background that has influenced your leadership style as a whole?
Pete Newell
Yeah, everything in my background does. I can tell you, even growing up as a kid that the way my parents raised me influenced me positively, and negatively in some cases. My military background, I have been fortunate to work for a group of fantastic military leaders, I spent time in the Special Operations community, I spent time working for Stan McChrystal, I spent time in the Pentagon working for brilliant people. I also worked for some of the absolute worst bosses in the entire world, and I rarely say this about people, they were just bad human beings, and I will tell you in many cases what I learned watching a leader in a just really horrible environment influenced me more than watching the really brilliant guys out there. If you think about it, it's really hard to pattern yourself after somebody who is brilliant and driven and successful and kind and they do all that, but I'll tell you what, you can look at somebody who is really a bad boss and say, I don't want to be like them, and it happens in an instant, that I do not ever want to be like that person. That teaches you a lot about the environment that you want to create that people are going to work in. I have some hard areas, and Ali will acknowledge some of them, in the way people are treated in the workplace. Also as a graduate of the Special Operations community, I have strong feelings about how high performing people should be allowed to perform, and also expectations of how they work. I think the military left me with a high degree of not just respect, but you want to hire people, there's a certain degree of dedication to their success, whether they stay in your company or whether they leave, or they go someplace else, whether they're challenged or something else. And I'll tell you, if there was something hard about transitioning from the military to the business world is, in the military, you're given people and you're told to make them successful no matter what. In the business world, you tend to just fire people who are unsuccessful and not invest time and energy in them. I have never been able to make that change, and it's a bit of a struggle sometimes, because in the business world, you can't afford to hang on to people who are subpar performers, if you want to run a high-performance organisation. So if there's one of the things that I have learned is I am challenged in letting somebody go because I see it as a personal failure if somebody fails to thrive in my organisation, that has been built and imprinted by my past. I think Ali has a very different opinion, because she comes from such a great different place. Here's the beauty of it, the work with people like Ali and some of the others, we can argue and disagree and fight like cats and dogs sometimes, but we still love each other, and it is still an absolutely amazing environment to work in. That's really what, if you get it right, that's what life's like.
Ula Ojiaku
What's your view, Ali?
Ali Hawks
So we clearly have different backgrounds, I think that I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of leadership style. Being in academia, you're not really in a leadership position because you're responsible for yourself, and in a way, it's a really good test bed for being an entrepreneur, because in academia you have to have such thick skin, because you turn in your peer reviewed journal publications, you turn in your papers and people write back and slash, and no one's trying to make you feel good. In fact, they want to help you, but also they're quite competitive. So that was a really good proving ground for being able to develop the thick skin for critical feedback or any feedback and really all of the knocks that come with being an entrepreneur. What I took into starting BMNT here four years ago was, things that I took from Pete and from the U.S. was really allowing people and high performers to work in the way that they feel best. One of the things I hated when I was younger in certain jobs, and working in law firms is punching your time card at 8 am, and you punch out at 5, and an hour for lunch, and it never felt right that that was the way to measure someone's productivity or to really enhance or empower people. And so the way that I approach it is we consider everyone to be an adult and to do their job, and also to be as curious as possible. So on our Standup this morning, with two new team members coming back into BMNT, one of the things that we agreed on is if no one's asking for time off to be creative or to have a day or two days to read a book that will enhance their knowledge or make them a better BMNTer, then we're failing. If no one has asked for that time by the end of this calendar year. So the way that I really approach leadership is how can I empower, but also invest in every single person, because it's not me delivering the everyday work, it’s the people in my company, so they're building it alongside of me. I hire smart young people who will give feedback and we action that feedback. So we change things based on what we get from a 23-year-old, so everyone in the company feels really valued. And I think, learning from Pete, is also being really honest and transparent with everyone in the company when your chips are down and you have to say, guys, this is what's going on, and I found it has built such a strong cohesion in the team that we have now, that this year going into it is the most excited I've ever been about running BMNT. So taking a lot of what I learned from Pete and also my own experiences of feeling really caged, actually, in most of my jobs, and being able to understand that people work in very different ways, and if you allow them to work in the ways that are best for them, you really do get the best of everyone.
Ula Ojiaku
That's very inspiring and insightful. Now, there was something Pete said earlier on about you, Ali, walking up to him and sharing the vision that you wanted to take back what BMNT is doing to the UK and so what made you go for it, what pushed you towards that?
Ali Hawks
Again, it was a lot of work on my part of really understanding what I wanted to do, and when I approached Pete that day, I was really excited and exuberant and I said, I want to take this back to the UK and I want to run it. And Pete is, as you get to know him, he's very calm and he's quiet, and he kind of looked at me and he said, you should talk to some people. And I thought, okay, I'll go talk to people. So I went out and I talked to people and I got Pete on the phone a few weeks later and I said, Pete, this is my dream job, this is what I want to do. And Pete said, prove it, do a Business Model Canvas. So I then hung up the phone, I googled Business Model Canvas, I watched YouTube videos on how to complete it. I was still working at the 809 Panel, so I was getting up really early to talk to people back in the UK, make phone calls, pulling on all of my contacts because I've been in defense and national security for gosh, since 2009, and I was canvassing everyone I knew, I filled out the Business Model Canvas, I sent it to Pete, he was going to be in DC about a week later, and he wrote back saying we should meet. So we then met and had an initial conversation around what it could look like, but it really wasn't until as Pete said in that library at Georgetown for a reception that we came together and having had both time to think and think about what I put down in the Business Model Canvas, but also how we got along, I think, and gelled as business partners, we decided, let's do it. So when we said we didn't have a plan, I had an idea of what we could do, and I have unfailing determination to make things work, and so I just knew, and I think we both knew if we tried it, that something would come of it, and if not, we would learn a lot from it. So we went from there and it took a while before we got a plan, to be honest, but we got there.
Ula Ojiaku
Well, here you are.
Ali Hawks
Exactly.
Pete Newell
You know, if there's one thing I have learned as an entrepreneur is that the plan you thought you were going to have, is never the one you actually execute. So the faster you begin to test it, usually by talking to people and doing things, the faster you will get rid of bad ideas. And it's not about finding the good idea, but it's about creating all the ideas you could possibly have and then killing them off quickly so that you understand the core of the value that you think you're going to deliver. Everything after that is the mechanics of how to build a business. I mean, that's not easy stuff, when you're launching a company, more importantly when you're launching one in a country you haven't been in in a while, but getting there is really about getting the thought process moving and getting people to disabuse you of the notion that every idea you have is brilliant.
Ula Ojiaku
I mean, I agree setting up a business isn't easy. I can't imagine the additional challenge of setting it up in the defense sector, the Department of Defense in the US, Ministry of Defence here in the UK. What sort of things would you say would be the additional? Do you have to go through hurdles to go through approvals, clearances and all that?
Ali Hawks
From the MOD experience, it's less about clearances and those types of things, it's more about understanding, winding your way through what feels like a maze, to find the right stakeholders that you can bring together at the right time to make a decision. So while there are individuals that hold budgets and can make decisions, there's a constellation of people around them that need to be aligned in concert with that decision. If you went to a business, of course, you'll have to have a couple of people on board, but the time to sale or the cost to sale is relatively straightforward. When you go into the government, you have a group of highly motivated people, highly mission-driven people who experience the pain of their problems every day, and they are trying to fight just as hard as you are in order to change something for the better. So in the first instance, you have great allyship with your customers, because you have a shared mission, and you're both working towards it, which is fantastic. The second is really trying to understand if that person has the budget and they need to sign off on it, how much do they need to care about it, or is it their chief of staff that needs to really care about it? Or is it their engineer? So I would say the difference is the amount of discovery that you do and doing that stakeholder mapping, is fundamental to success, but also knowing that people change jobs in the civil service and the Armed Forces every few years, that is a critical skill as a business working with the government, that stakeholder mapping and that discovery with your customers, customer development never ends. So I think that that is the longest pole in the tent in terms of finding the right people, and sometimes people say that's the person that has authority, you go talk to them and they say, no, I don't have any authority, so it's really trying to wind your way through the maze to align those key stakeholders.
Pete Newell
I would add to what Ali said, is that it's like climbing into a very complicated Swiss watch and you need to understand not just how things work, but you need to understand why they work the way they do, and how they work with other things, and then you need to understand who's responsible for making them work and who the beneficiary of the work is, and who possibly might want to make them not work. So, Ali's comment on stakeholder development, it's at the heart of everything you do -- you talk about more sociology and anthropology than it is anything, it truly is understanding why things work the way they do and what drives people to behave one way versus another. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to motivate them to behave one way or another, and where you might fit to help them in their daily job or whatever else. But that stakeholder development and understanding who's in charge, who benefits, who doesn't benefit, why something might be counter to something else is so critical in any consulting business, but in particular, if you are trying to get something done inside a government organisation. It, in many cases, it's archaic, but it still operates underneath a very definitive culture that you can map if you've been at it long.
Ula Ojiaku
So BMNT, you help government organisations to solve hard problems at speed and at scale. Can you expand on this?
Pete Newell
It's both I think. I go back to my experience, way back in the Rapid Equipping Force and 2010 is first and foremost, there are tens of thousands of problems that prevent the government from doing what it wants to do. The government is challenged, first, in being able to identify those problems; second, in translating those problems into plain English that other people might understand; third, in using that translated thing to find ever bigger groups of people, to then redefine the problem one more time, so that it makes sense for the rest of the world; and fourth, creating the policies and process that will attract people to come to them and work with them to solve those problems fast enough to build a solution before the problem changes so much that the calculus is completely out of whack again. And in all this there's a complicated long answer, but the impedance difference between the speed at which you develop and acknowledge a problem and your ability to get people to work on it, if it's out of sync with the speed at which technology is being adopted and adapted, you will constantly be perfectly solving the wrong problem, and you'll be constantly delivering things that are antiquated before the day they land in somebody's hands, so that's really the speed issue. I go back to what I said about sociology. This is the speed of your ability to get people to come together to work on something, and then the scale is determining, scale how fast, and scale how big. The scale how fast is, I can start to deliver a solution to this, but I know the solution is going to change every 6 months. So I don't need to commit to building tens of thousands of these over a 5-year contract, but I do need to commit to changing what I deliver every 6 months, or this is going to scale to some big end and it goes into a much different system, you have to be ambidextrous about your approach to scale, and unfortunately most procurement laws, both the United States and in the UK are not built to be ambidextrous. They're built to do one thing and one thing very efficiently only. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works anymore.
Ula Ojiaku
Any thoughts, Ali?
Ali Hawks
As Pete said, and as a sociologist, the most often thing, and I think Pete said this a long time ago when we first met, is the government doesn't have a tech adoption problem, it has a people problem, and a lot of our work, a lot of our customers will come and say they have a tech problem, and they have a huge degree of urgency, but the things that get in their way are they have no common language, and they have no repeatable and scalable process in which to think about and work on their problems. And the framework that we developed, the innovation pipeline, is that process for them to do it. It's not complicated, it's methodology agnostic, and so it allows you to develop an entire workforce around a common language of innovating, mission acceleration, agile transformation, whatever you want to do, recognising that people are at the heart of it. The Head of Innovation at UC Berkeley and during one of our Lean Innovators Summit, said something that has stuck with me for several years now, ad he said, and it really hit home with our customers, because sometimes when I first started BMNT here, I was such an evangelist that I forgot to listen to the customer.
I was just so convinced that they needed what we had, and I think the customer was telling me something else and I would get frustrated, and when I heard this, it was resistance is rational. When we go into a room with a group of people, we usually have a customer who is an evangelist of ours, or an early adopter, a huge supporter, and they have a couple of other people who feel the same way they do about change and innovation and moving rapidly, and then 70 percent of the team don't feel that same way. So approaching it and really empathising with the customers and understanding resistance is rational, why would they want to change? Things for them work, the way that they have always done, it works, and that is a rational response. So being able to then develop a service where you're connecting with them and saying, I understand that, and that's a rational response, and then using tools, like one of my favourite tools, the Value Proposition Canvas, to really understand, what are the jobs to be done, and the pains and the gains, and when you speak in that type of language, there are so many times that I have seen this kind of aha moment of like, oh, so if I did that, then I wouldn't have to do this anymore, or I would be able to do this different thing. And this is not complicated, these are not complicated tools or processes we're talking about, but the common denominators of it are discipline, consistency, and hard work. And I think, coming off what Pete said, when you want to get pace and speed, you have to be consistent and you have to be disciplined, and people have to understand what you're saying in order to get over that resistance is rational piece.
Pete Newell
I think Ali’s spot on in terms of the problem with the problem. Oftentimes is, we can put a problem in a room and 10 people work on it and get 10 different versions of the problem,
and so part of the art that's involved in the process is to get a group of people to agree to a common definition of a problem and use the same words, because many times we’re inventing new words. It's new technology, new problem, but the first thing we do is get everybody to say the same thing the same way, and then start to talk to other people about it, because part two of that is you learn that your problem is probably not the right problem, it's a symptom of something else, and that whole process of discovery is a very disciplined, I would say it's a scientific methodology applied to how we communicate with people. You have to get out and test your theory by talking to the right people in a big enough diverse crowd to truly understand that whether you're on the right track or the wrong track. That's hard work, it really is hard work, and it's even harder to get what I would say critical feedback from people in the process who will challenge your assumptions and will challenge your test, who will challenge the outcomes of that. That's what our team does such a great job of, working with customers to teach them how to do that, but listening to them and helping them come together. At the same time, we're looking at the quality of the work and because we're a third party, we can look over the shoulder and say I see the test, and I see the outcome, but I don't think your test was adequate, or I don't think you tested this in an environment that was diverse enough, that you may be headed down the wrong path. The customer can still decide to go with what they learn, but in most cases, at least they're getting honest feedback that should allow them to pause and relook something.
Ali Hawks
I think for this particular reason, this is why BMNT is a leader in this space, is because the kind of jurisdiction around that front end of the pipeline, of are we making sure that we're choosing from enough problems and we're not stuck with a couple of investments that might be bad, so to speak, really validating that problem to decide, is it worth working on, is this even progressible, does anyone care about it, can it technically be done, does the organisation care about it, before spending any money on investment. Now that front end of the pipeline is gradually becoming a stronger muscle, and I'll speak for the UK, is gradually becoming a stronger muscle because of the work that BMNT has done, and both in the US and the UK, there is incredibly strong muscle memory around experimentation and incubation, which is fantastic. There's a lot of structure around that and frameworks and a lot of common language, which is amazing, because when you have that developed, going back to the beginning to refine before you put into the machine, so to speak, that's where what we call curation, really validating that problem, that's a single most determining factor on whether a problem will transition to an adopted solution. Most of government starts in experimentation and incubation, so they don't get the benefit of de-risking investment in a solution, and they don't necessarily get the benefit of all the learning to expedite that into incubation and experimentation. So I think where BMNT comes out and really owns that area is in that front end of the pipeline, and when you do that front end, you would be amazed at how fast the other part of the pipeline goes through discover incubation experimentation, because you've increased confidence and really de-risked investment in the solution.
Ula Ojiaku
Thanks for sharing that Ali, would you say you're applying lean innovation amongst other things to the framework you're referring to, or would that be something else?
Pete Newell
No, I think that it's all part of the process. We use a variety of tools to get to the data we want, and then it's a matter of doing analysis, and this is why Ali's background as an academic is so critical, because she's keen on analysis, and looking at the data and not skewing the data one way or another, and that's an incredibly important skill in this process. Again, this is really the application of a scientific methodology, and you need to be able to do that, but you need to understand how to get the data. So whether it's Lean or it's Scrum or it's some Google tool or something else. We have become really adaptive in the use of the tools and a mixture of the tools to drive a community of people to create the data we need to make an assessment of whether something's going the right direction or not. And that's the beauty of being involved with the Lean Innovation Educators Forum, the beauty of the time we spend with folks like Alex Osterwalder or with Steve Blank or with the folks from the d.school at Stanford or any of those places that are developing tools. It is understanding how to use and adopt the tool to fit the circumstances, but at the end of the day, it's all about creating the data you need to use the analysis that will drive an insight, that will allow you to make a decision. Too often I find people who are just overly enamoured with the tool and they forget that the tool is just a tool. It's about data, insight, and decisions, and you have to get to a decision at some point.
Ula Ojiaku
Data, insight, decisions. Amazing. So, if we shift gears a little bit and go into your Strategic Innovation Project, SIP, I understand that one of the shifts you're driving in the DoD and MoD respectively is about their approach to involving private investment in defence technology. Could you share a bit more about that?
Pete Newell
As part of the innovation pipeline, you have to eventually transition out of the discovery phase and at the end of discovery, you should know that you have the right problem. You have a potential solution and you have a potential pathway that will allow you to deliver that solution in time to actually have an impact on the problem. At that point, you start incubating that solution, and if it's a tech or a product, then you're talking about either helping a company build the right thing, or you're talking about starting a new company, and that new company will have to do the thing. Our work in terms of early-stage tech acceleration is really now focused on what we call dual-use technologies. Those technologies that are required to solve a problem in the military, but also have a digital twin in the commercial world. There has to be a commercial reason for the company being built that’s actually going to solve the problem, and so as we looked at that, we found really interesting conversations with investors in the United States and then eventually overseas who were looking for a way to help defense get the technologies it wanted, but have portfolios that don't allow them to just invest in a defense technology, and they were looking for an opportunity to engage one, with like-minded investors, but two, in honest conversations about problems that existed in the military and in the commercial world so they can make better decisions about the deployment of their capital to create the right companies. I think it's probably been five years now we've been working on the hypothesis around this. we started to develop a very strong language around dual-use investments in early-stage tech acceleration and adoption, and we started to build new tools inside government programs, as well as new groups of investors and other folks who wanted to be involved. All that was fine in the United States, but then we found it was a slightly different application outside the United States, particularly in Europe, which is not necessarily the most Startup friendly environment in the world in terms of investment, but at the same time, understanding that the United States has an unequalled appetite for technology to the point where that technology doesn't necessarily exist within the United States, nor do the best opportunities to test that technology exist for the United States, so we had to come up with a way that would allow us to do the same type of investigation with our allies, which turns into this incredible opportunity amongst allied nations and companies and vendors and things like that. And I know that from Ali's standpoint, watching NATO DIANA and other programs start, that it is more challenging, it's a different environment in Europe than it is in the United States.
Ali Hawks
Picking up there and in terms of the way that we think about investment, and what Pete is talking about is a program we run called Hacking 4 Allies. We currently work with Norway and take dual-use Norwegian Startups into our incubator and accelerator called H4XLabs in the US and we help them enter the US defense market and the commercial market, and one of the things that we're starting to see over here is it is a pathway that doesn't really exist in Europe. So when we think about NATO's DIANA, what DIANA is focused on, which is dual-use and deep tech and what they are overly focused on, and I think is correct, is how do you raise investment in the countries themselves to help booster a whole range of effects around being able to raise money within the country? Ultimately, though, and a lot of what DIANA was doing, in terms of the concept and its focus on dual-use and deep tech, was before the invasion of Ukraine, and so at that time before that, I think in terms of the NATO Innovation Fund and thinking about investment and NATO, it wasn't as comfortable with dual-use and investing in dual-use as the US is, not only is the US comfortable, but you have things like we helped a private capital fund, where people feel a great deal of patriotism, or that it's a part of their service to be able to contribute in that way. That feeling doesn't exist, it exists here, but it manifests itself in a different way, and it doesn't manifest itself as let's invest in dual-use technologies to help our defense and national security. So there's different understandings and cultural feelings towards those things. Now, having had the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in Israel and Gaza and now in Yemen, I think that the change is accelerating, insofar as what are the capabilities that we need to rapidly develop within NATO to be able to feel secure on our borders, and what type of investment does that take? Now, US investment in Europe has dropped about 22 percent in 2023, and so they're a little bit nervous about investing in these companies, and so the strength that being able to change the investment paradigm, which is ultimately, the companies that are going to receive the investment from the NATO Innovation Fund and NATO DIANA, they want to develop in the country, but ultimately all of those companies and their investors want them to get to a bigger market, and that bigger market is the US. So, what we are able to do is to connect real dollars, government dollars and commercial dollars, to those companies. We are one of the only pathways outside of export regimes for the Department of International Trade here in the UK. We are one of the only private pathways that has not only been tested and proved, but that we are able to take more companies year on year, take them to the US and prove that model. Now that's really exciting, especially as we see some of the investment declining, because we're able to identify those companies, we're able to connect them to problems that matter that people are trying to solve, develop the use cases, and then help them on the commercialisation side of things in terms of going into a new market. I think that the way that we think about investment in the US from a BMNT perspective, and the US is a little bit different from Europe and the UK, but the exciting thing is now that we have this proven pathway to enhance and accelerate concepts like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund.
Ula Ojiaku
So it sounds to me like it's not just about the localised investment into the innovation, it’s also about BMNT building pathways, so European Startups, for example, that want an inroad into the US, maybe vice versa.
Pete Newell
I think the AUKUS DIN, the Defense Investor Network really is the collection of the US Investor Network, the UK and Australia. All three countries had Defense Investor Networks that had been set up over the last several years and primarily focused on, one, allowing investors to engage other investors about topics that are of common interest when it comes to this dual-use paradigm; and two, being able to engage with people in the government about things the investors were concerned about. I'm very clear when I talk about the Defense Investor Network, it is about defense investors, not about the government's problem. I've had to redefine that multiple times, as this is about enabling investors to be more proactive and participate in building the right kinds of companies, not about the government telling investors what they need to do, or the government telling the investors how they need to do it. It really, it was built from the investor perspective, and then we found is that the investors were prolifically honest about their feedback to senior people in the government, which I think has been hard for people in the government to get that kind of feedback, but when an investor with a portfolio of 30 and 40 companies looks at the government and says, I will never do it the way you just described, and here's why. Until you change that quantity, it makes no sense for us to participate, invest in, do, you'd be amazed. Sometimes it is the first time somebody's been able to articulate why something isn't going to happen, and then people nod their heads, well, I'll quit asking for that, or I'll go back and change something to see what it is we can do. So, we went from Hacking 4 Allies, which started out as a BMNT program with the Norwegians, to Hacking 4 Allies with the UK, Australia, Norway. At the same time, we had set up the Defense Investor Network, but as soon as we started the Allies program in the UK, the UK-based investors raised their hands and said, what you're doing in the United States, we want to do here, and then the same thing happened in Australia. When they made the AUKUS announcement, it just made too much sense to be able to look at, if we really want a free flow of technology and problems across the AUKUS governments, then surely we should be building ecosystems of like-minded people who can help drive those conversations. So it was super, super easy to bring the AUKUS Investor Network together, it was just too easy. The part that I think is not so easy, but we need to do work on is we, those investors need to be fed problems that are of an AUKUS nature, and at the same time, the governments need to listen to the investors when they tell them they have problems investing in companies that aren't allowed to participate in exercise or training or contracting or acquisitions in a different country, and if you really want to make AUKUS a real thing, there are a lot of policies that have to change. There's been a lot of progress made, but I think there's a lot more left to do to, to really get the opportunity to happen.
Ula Ojiaku
And would you say some of the problems would be related to what government officials would call national security, because if it's a dual-use spec, whilst it has its secular or commercial use, in the military, you wouldn't want other people knowing how you're deploying that technology and the ins and outs of it. So could that be one of the issues here?
Pete Newell
My definition of national security really touches public safety all the way up to military, so it's both. I think if you dig into it, it touches everything from supply chain, to access, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to education and workforce development, and you name it. There's a paradigm shift that has to happen if we're going to build more things, more often rather than long term ships and things like that, that as allied nations, we have to be able to attack all of the underlying foundational problems, and that's my supply chain, raw materials, manufacturing, and workforce that's necessary for the future. No one country is going to get that fixed all by themselves, and I think, to me, that's the absolute brilliance of what AUKUS should be able to focus on.
Ali Hawks
I agree, and I think that to being able to co-invest as well, the opportunity for investors to come around and understand what are the opportunities to, not only co-invest and coordinate, but to be able to scan their companies and their deal flow to see where their companies can partner and secure greater work and contracts and scale. So I think that it's a really important initiative in terms of being a steward of an extremely important ecosystem, not only being a steward, but being able to build that ecosystem of support and development. How we look at national security in the UK is really no different than what Pete talked about, and when we think about working with companies and the willingness to work with big tech companies or small tech companies or whatever it is, it's not just simply one transaction where, here's the money and here's your software. So obviously the kind of employment and the skills, but what is the ecosystem around that technology that is necessary? Does it require sensors and chips, and what is it that it requires that's going to bring in multiple different industries to support it, and that's really what the agenda here around prosperity is. How do we invest in these types of technologies and their ecosystems around it to have a more prosperous Britain? So you have a wider spread of skills as opposed to just investing in one thing. I think that's where AUKUS brings three very important allies together to be able to do that individually, but then the option to do it across in terms of the broader strategy and the policy around AUKUS, is a once in a lifetime chance that I think has come up.
Ula Ojiaku
So I think the key thing here is, this is a space to be watched, there's lots of opportunity and the potential of having the sum being greater than the parts is really huge here. One last question on this topic. So you said deep tech, and with Open AI's launch of ChatGPT earlier on last year, the world seems to have woken up to, generative AI. Do you see any influence this trend would have, or is having, in the military space in the Defense Innovation space.
Pete Newell
I think the world has woken up and is staring into the sun and is blinded. The challenge with AI in general, and I would say that it's not the challenge, AI has a long way to go, and by and large, folks are really focused on the high end of what AI can do, but people have to learn how to use AI and AI has to learn. What we're not doing is using AI to solve the mundane, boring, time wasting problems that are preventing our workforce from doing the high end work that only a human being can do, and I don't care how many billions of dollars we're pouring into building robots and other things, it's all great, but we still have government people managing spreadsheets of data that, they become data janitors, not analysts, and it is particularly bad in the intelligence world. I quote the Chief Information Officer of a large logistics agency who said data is not a problem, we have tons of data, it's just crappy, it's not tagged, it's not usable, we have data going back to the 1950s, we have no means of getting that data tagged so it's useful. Now, if we put time and energy into building AI products that would correctly tag old data, it'd be amazing what we can do. In the cases that we have helped develop tools with our clients, they'll save anywhere from a million to 300 million dollars a year in finding discrepancies in supply chain stuff, or finding other issues. So imagine if we put that kind of work in place for other people, but free people up to do more, better, smarter things, how much more efficient the use of the government's time and money would be, so that that money and that time could be invested in better things.
So when I say, yeah, the AI is out there and people's eyes are open, but they're staring into the sun. They're not looking at the ground in front of them and solving the things that they could be solving at the speed they should be doing it, and unfortunately, I think they're creating a gap where legacy systems are being left further and further behind, but those legacy systems, whether it's finance, personnel, supply chain, discipline, things like that, aren't going to be able to make the transition to actually be useful later on. So I would describe it as an impending train wreck.
Ula Ojiaku
And what would be, in your view, something that could avert this oncoming train wreck.
Pete Newell
I think a concerted effort, really just to have the government say we're going to use AI to get rid of as much of the legacy brute force work that our populations are doing so that we can free them up to do other things. Part of this is we're then going to take the money we save and channel that money back into investment in those organisations. Right now, the money just goes away, that's great, you did better, therefore, your budget's reduced. There's no incentive to get better that way, but if you look at an organisation and say, you know, if you can save 10 million dollars a year, we'll give you that 10 million dollars to reinvest back into your organisation to do better and something else. Now, you have some incentive to actually make change happen.
Ula Ojiaku
Any thoughts, Ali?
Ali Hawks
I think the exciting thing for us, the way that I look at it in terms of government is that that government enablement to be able to use AI, here they are building large language models for the government based on the data that they have, and there's a lot of excitement around it and there should be. It's a pretty exciting thing to do. I think where we’re in a really strong position and what I find really exciting is being able to do what we do best, which is help them understand what is the query and how do you validate that query?
So what are the basic skills that you need to be able to interact, and then to be able to retain the skills of critical analysis, so when the answer comes back, you do not take that as the end all be all. It is a tool. So within your decision-making process, it's decreasing the amount of time it takes you to gather a certain amount of information, but just as you would if you were doing a book report, you still have to validate the sources and understanding, and you have to apply your own judgment and your own experience to that packet of information, which is what we all do every day, but it's not really thought about that way. So I think that the way that people are looking at it here is it will be able give us the decision and it will be able to kind of do our job for us, and for some tools, yes, and I completely agree that we need to free up all of the mundane work that hoovers up the time of civil servants here, because it's extraordinary how they're bogged down, and it completely disempowers them and it contributes to low retention rates and recruitment rates. But I think also it’s developing the muscle to be able to do that critical thinking in order to leverage human intelligence to engage with artificial intelligence. And I think that's where we are uniquely positioned to do that because that is the bulk of our work on the front end of the pipeline, which is how are you going to validate what you know, how are you going to get the problem statement in order to query what you need to query and then having the judgment and the analysis to be able to look at that answer and make a decision, based on your own human intellect. That's where I see it playing here. I completely agree with Pete, we have people looking into the sun being like LLMs and they're going to solve everything, but you sit, let's say a hundred people down in front of an LLM and tell me how many people know what to ask it, or how to use it and integrate it into their everyday workflow. There’s a long way to go, but I feel really excited about it because I feel like we have something so incredible to offer them to be able to enhance their engagement with AI.
Ula Ojiaku
That sounds excellent, thank you. Just to go to the rapid fire questions. So, Ali, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most?
Ali Hawks
So I don't read a lot of work books, in terms of like how to run a company or anything like that, sorry, Pete, but, and I have a 4-year-old and three stepchildren, so I don't actually read as much as I used to, but I have read over in the last few weeks, the book Impromptu by Reid Hoffman about AI, which is great, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commute into London, so the Huberman Lab podcast I listen to a lot, but if you're looking for workplace inspiration, I'm afraid I look at Instagram, listen to podcasts, and then I follow Allie K. Miller, who writes a lot about AI, came out of Amazon, and she is fantastic for breaking things down into really bite sized chunks if you're trying to learn about AI, if you don't come from a technical background.
Ula Ojiaku
Thanks, Ali, we'll put these in the show notes. And Pete, what about you?
Pete Newell
I will give you two new books. One of them is a fun one, Wiring the Winning Organization written by Gene Kim and Steven Spear. Steve Spear is a good friend of ours, he's been a great mentor and advisor inside BMNT for a long time, I've known Steve since way back in my early days. The other one is by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton, and it's called The Friction Project, and it's just like you say, it's all about friction in the workplace. I think both of those books tend to lend themselves to how to drive performance in organisations, and I think, knowing all of the authors, that they are phenomenal books, but I think the experience the four of them bring to the dialogue and the discussion of what the future workplace needs to look like and the things we need to solve will all be buried in those books. In terms of podcasts, I'm all over the map, I chase all kinds of things that I don't know. I listen to podcasts about subjects that I’m clueless about that just spark my interest, so I wouldn't venture to pick any one of them except yours, and to make sure that people listen to yours.
Ula Ojiaku
You're very kind, Pete. Well, because you're on it, they definitely would. Would you both be thinking about writing a book sometime, because I think your story has been fascinating and there are lots of lessons
Pete Newell
Only if Ali would lead it. So I have picked up and put down multiple proposals to write books around the innovation process within the government and other places, and part of the reason I keep stopping is it keeps changing. I don't think we're done learning yet, and I think the problem writing a book is you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the things that we are very focused on for the military, we talk about doctrine, what is the language of innovation inside the government workplace? It's the thing that we keep picking up, we've helped at least one government organisation write their very first innovation doctrine, the Transportation Security Administration of all places, the very first federal agency to produce a doctrine for innovation that explains what it is, why it is connected to the mission of the organisation, and describes a process by which they'll do it. I think within the Ministry of Defence, Department of Defense, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce a document that connects the outcome of innovation to the mission of the organisation. We call that mission acceleration. We look at innovation as a process, not an end state. The end state is actually mission acceleration.
There's probably a really interesting book just to be written about Ali's journey, and I say more Ali's journey than mine because I think as a woman founder of a defence company in the UK, all of the characters in the book are completely unlikely. So somewhere down the road, maybe.
Ula Ojiaku
Well, I'm on the queue waiting for it, I will definitely buy it. So where can the listeners and viewers find you if, if they want to get in touch?
Ali Hawks
We’re both on LinkedIn, so Pete Newell, Ali Hawks, our emails too are on our various websites, bmnt.com, bmnt.co.uk.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. Any final words for the audience?
Pete Newell
I'll say thank you again for one, having us. Like I said, it's the first opportunity Ali and I have had to be on a podcast together. Any opportunity I get to engage with the folks and have this conversation is a gift. So thank you for giving us the time.
Ula Ojiaku
My pleasure.
Ali Hawks
Yes, Ula, thanks very much for having us on together. It's been great.
Ula Ojiaku
I've enjoyed this conversation and listening to you both. So thank you so much. The pleasure and the honour is mine. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!