PATHWAYS AND CHALLENGES TO INNOVATION IN AEROSPACE

Pathways and Challenges to Innovation in Aerospace



Pathways and Challenges to Innovation in Aerospace

Abstract

This paper explores impediments to innovation in aerospace and suggests how successful pathways from other industries can be adopted to facilitate greater innovation. Because of its nature, space exploration would seem to be a ripe field of technical innovation. However, engineering can also be a frustratingly conservative endeavor when the realities of cost and risk are included. Impediments like the “find the fault” engineering culture, the treatment of technical risk as almost always evaluated in terms of negative impact, the difficult to account for expansive Moore's Law growth when making predictions, and the stove-piped structural organization of most large aerospace companies and federally funded research laboratories tend to inhibit cross-cutting technical innovation.

One successful example of a "multi-use" cross cutting application that can scale with Moore's Law is the Evolutionary Computational Methods (ECM) technique developed at the Jet Propulsion Lab for automated spectral retrieval. Future innovations like computational engineering and automated design optimization can potentially redefine space exploration, but will require learning lessons from successful innovators. Impediments to technical innovation exist at every level of space exploration. The “find the fault” culture of most engineering groups tends to be highly effective at honing in at robust solutions at the expense of introducing new and innovative ideas. Technical risk is almost always evaluated is terms of negative impact and likelihood, but rarely is it considered in terms of opportunity or advantage. In contrast, a complete way of managing risk is to consider the risk versus reward ratio in the evaluation.

Additionally, the observation of Moore's Law or the Law of Accelerating Returns means that certain processes have been and will continue to advance with exponential growth. Computational power doubles for the same unit cost every 13 months (a factor of 500 every decade). Bandwidth, memory, gene sequencing costs and other processes are advancing even faster. However, it is extremely difficult to account for this unnatural expansive growth when making predictions about future products. Because this growth is not built into aerospace roadmaps, organizations miss opportunities fully utilize their potential.

Finally, the stove-piped structural organization of most large aerospace companies and federally funded research laboratories tends to only advocate technologies that benefit the sub-field and not the organization as a whole. Creating, and recognizing new, innovative ideas is just the first step. Ideas must be embraced by the supporting organization, and the applications generated from the new ideas must be infused. This latter step is the most difficult to overcome and the final roadblock for most new ideas. Many of these same impediments to technical innovation also exist in creative fields recognized for their ability to find new ideas. By understanding how innovation is handled in other organizations, the space exploration field may find new paths to increase its performance in the era of Moore's Law.

Introduction

Because of its nature, space exploration would seem to be a ripe field of technical ...