NATO Innovation Hub

From jumpstart to graduation, our first Project Mercury @NATO cohort has successfully completed our Professional Innovator program! Congratulations to all participants who can now call themselves Certified Professional Innovators and becoming a part of the NATO innovation community and the NATO Innovation Network (NIN). Participants worked in teams on hand-on problems they experience in their professional work, for which they built solutions using the Competing Values Framework understanding by Jeff DeGraff of professional innovation. Of course, now the cohort has graduated, we aim for their solutions to find their way into operating practice! For an overview of the projects our team worked on, check their graduation pitch videos using the link below and do not hesitate to reach out to the teams: https://lnkd.in/eWXVA9xj Project Mercury Innovators Forum, a 3-month program developed by the Innovatrium, brings innovation theory to practice. Project Mercury helps build innovation culture, competency, and communities that NATO and its strategic partners need in order to maintain free and vibrant societies. As such, we are proud to have brought this first cohort to completion, and are already looking forward to NATO Cohort 2! Special thanks to our staff at the NATO Innovation Hub, lead coach Melissa "Cleo" Smith from the Innovatrium, their supporting staff and our alumni coaches for making this possible! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators

During the inaugural NATO Open Innovation Conference & Expo, NOICE24, the NATO Innovation Network has come together like never before. Almost 200 innovation practitioners from 20 Nations came together to connect, learn and share their experiences in military innovation. Our NATO Innovation Network (NIN) is growing and this event marks a new step into bringing innovators across the Alliance together into a winning team. With NOICE we lay the groundwork for addressing tomorrow’s challenges, today. “The NATO Innovation Hub and the NATO Innovation Network are instrumental in bringing together innovators and the innovation community to allow us to face the challenges before us and outpace our adversaries.” - Vice Admiral Jeff Hughes, Deputy Chief Of Staff Capability Development of NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT). #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators

Today, our first ever NATO Open Innovation Conference & Expo kicked off! NOICE24 brings together innovation practitioners from throughout NATO, and with almost 200 attendees from 20 Nations we have brought together a wealth of experience in innovation. Today, we’ve heard from Admiral Gouveia e Melo from the Portuguese Navy about the importance of collaboration in innovation, had our own Vice Admiral Jeff Hughes, Deputy Chief of Staff Capability Development, share his views on delivering disruption to the battlefield and heard a wide range of experts on what disruption in innovation means for the military instrument of power. Tomorrow, we’ll get practical. We will open our Expo and deliver hands on experience in workshops and courses. Let’s make some NOICE! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators

This week, our biggest event of the year will kick off in Troia, Portugal! With close to 200 representatives from 20 nations, we’re bringing together the growing NATO innovation community like we have never done before. The NATO Innovation Network (NIN) is instrumental in bringing the Alliance together to build diverse connections and foster the innovative mindsets of our practitioners. We’re excited to make some NOICE! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators https://lnkd.in/e5KwfCjh

And they're off! With the jumpstart week done, our Project Mercury Innovators Forum @ NATO teams have received a fast-paced kickstart of their innovation journey. We explored deviance, deliberately placed ourselves outside of our comfort zone, thought prismatically and pushed the teams to focus on their problems until it hurt. But above all, we had fun! No learning takes place without fun, and in Project Mercury innovation knows no spectators. Shout out to all teams for bringing their energy and creativity and inspiring us from the very start. Our coaches look forward to working with you for the next 13 weeks. Let's fly this innovation rocket! 🚀

Today our first Project Mercury Innovators Forum @ NATO cohort got a real taste of the star power behind transformative innovation. Air Marshall Johnny Stringer, Deputy Commander of Allied Air Command held a rallying call to action to the cohort, empowering our teams and sharing his own energy and drive to bring innovation forward. The Air Marshal highlighted the importance of communication and outreach, and building coalitions to join the fight for innovation. He acknowledged that achieving transformative change is far from easy, however it is something we must do. We must collect energetic people in focused teams to understand the problems of our organizations. Looking from ‘across the street’ is essential to gain a different perspective and to unlock the freedom to truly understand problems that exist inside the organization. We need new thinking and practice with innovating in community and it is essential to not get ‘lost in the process’ - but to always return to what results we are trying to create. We also need to allow our innovators the freedom to explore the problem space and experiment, to which the Air Marshal offered his personal support. Innovation is not just creative thinking, it’s creative doing. We’re proud and honored by the Air Marshal’s visit, and believe it shows true innovation is supported by the highest of levels, empowering us to grow the innovation community and in turn empower our teams to pick up the challenge! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators

Day one; done! NATO cohort 1 has taken off into their jumpstart to the Project Mercury Innovators Forum course. During the day we had an inspiring lecture by prof. Dr. Jeff DeGraff, after which dr. W. Ethan Eagle🔴🟡 guided the teams through three first exercises: exploring a problem space and watching the weather. Our 30 NATO innovators brought great energy, and we and the coaches are ready to push them further during the next days of jumpstart!

From Poland we move on to Germany… Today we kicked off the next collaboration between NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the Project Mercury Innovators Forum! Shout out to our very own coaches Bart Hollants & Jeroen Franssen, our previous Project Mercury alumni and coaches (Thomas Belka, Danny Mckenzie) that support us, and our German and NATO AIRCOM hosts at Ramstein Air Base! Our first NATO Cohort will follow the full Project Mercury program, a twelve-week innovation course focusing on fostering the innovative mindset needed to achieve innovation in a military setting. During the Jumpstart, teams will get to know each other, delineate the problem space they will tackle and start to work on developing their innovative capacity to create solutions. We look forward to it, and the exciting journey teams will embark on! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators W. Ethan Eagle🔴🟡 Melissa "Cleo" Smith Kelley Sloan Sawyer Jeff DeGraff

It’s a wrap! The workshop “Innovators on the Eastern Flank” was a great success. Workshops like these are crucial in building the NATO innovation community and expand the NATO Innovation Network. Many thanks to our Polish hosts and the Project Mercury team! On to the next one! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators

And we’re off! NATOs Innovation Hub and the Innovatrium kicked off the workshop “Innovators on the Eastern Flank” in Warsaw today. During the three-day workshop, we will deep dive into innovation, focusing on the eastern flank of NATO, kickstarting innovative and creative thinking under the inspiring leadership of prof. Dr. Jeff DeGraff and his team from the Project Mercury Innovators Forum and our very own coaches Jeroen Franssen and Bart Hollants. With this workshop, the first of more to come, NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) fosters the innovation community in the Alliance. So we can win as a team! #WeAreNATO #WeAreInnovators