MITRE Quick Ukraine Reponses Initiative – Leveraging Corporate Culture for Real World Impact
Breakout Session
Wednesday, May 24 11:15am – 12:15pm ET
| Following the devastating Russian invasion of Ukraine, MITRE went into action. Learn about MITRE’s rapid response to support Ukraine by developing practical technology-based solutions, ranging from refugee tracking to defense to war crimes documentation, within months of program launch. This session will outline how MITRE’s culture, with a corporate-value foundation of speed, risk taking, and collaboration, enables employees to respond to situations and develop critical solutions at the speed of need. This case study presentation will discuss how MITRE was quickly able to bring diverse cross-organizational expertise to bear in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how these practices can be applied to your organization’s innovation initiatives. As part of the presentation, the presenters will leverage the MITRE Innovation Toolkit to guide participants through identification of barriers and opportunities within their own organizations. Participants will be exposed to techniques and approaches to breeding an innovative, adaptable environment where speed, risk taking, and collaboration is rewarded. MITRE embraced the fog of war, trusted its 10,000-strong workforce, and catalyzed a Tiger Team to stand up an idea marketplace on Slack channels. The Team crowdsourced both notional problems and corresponding ideas and facilitated debates and revisions until the ideas were shaped as proposals. Teams of logistical, operational, and technology subject matter experts were fostered around those ideas, often connecting people from around the Corporation and linking seemly unrelated technologies. MITRE’s internal Research and Development idea submission platform was leveraged to accept more than 100 proposals that resulted from the aforementioned ideas. The eleven selected proposals were down-selected according to four primary characteristics: (1) most impactful in the near term, (2) uniquely suited to drawing from MITRE’s expertise, (3) embodied MITRE’s “Whole of Nation” ethic, and (4) brought cross-MITRE expertise to bear. As the selected projects were launched, corresponding teams worked to connect the resultant solutions to government sponsors, non-government organizations, and industry players to build the requisite support, partnership, deployment alignment, and funding that would allow these ideas to make it to the field. This corporate initiative put critical solutions in the hands of end users on time and under budget. Moreover, it allowed the public realization of corporate values scribed on campus walls and ignited the passion of employees to serve the citizens of Ukraine. |
Meet the Speakers
Dr. Michael A. Balazs serves as an Autonomy Futurist and Director of Early Career Programs for MITRE’s National Security Sector. He is responsible for furthering autonomy’s impact on the mission by advancing autonomous technology, adoption, and trust within the services and combatant commands. He identifies and executes opportunities uniquely suited to MITRE’s role and strengths as a federally funded research and development center. Dr. Balasz co-manages a portfolio of small Unmanned Systems (sUXS) programs focused on the operationalization of these technologies in support of the intelligence, special operations, and service communities. He also leads MITRE’s Generation AI program which aims to bring about the AI economy through exposure of all students, independent of their field of study, to AI before they enter the workforce. Dr. Balazs’s contributions have resulted in numerous awards and have been featured in the Economist, WIRED Magazine, Fortune, National Geographic’s Breakthroughs, SPIE Defense, Sensing, and Security Conference and the AUVSI Xponential conference.
Dr. Karen Hathaway Viani is an innovation strategist with more than 25 years of experience leading teams developing and enabling high-impact technology solutions in unstructured, fast-changing environments. In her current role as MITRE National Security Sector Integration Lead and Chief of Staff to the General Manager and Senior Vice President, she works with the MNS Senior Leadership Team to support strategy development, mission execution, special projects, and internal and external engagement. Dr. Hathaway Viani has been with MITRE since 2012 in various leadership roles around the corporation, and most recently served as a senior technical advisor and deputy director for the Strategic Partnerships and Technology Transfer Office. In this role, she was responsible for forming global strategic partnerships in the private and public sectors and academia to accelerate innovation and commercialization of MITRE technologies.