IMAGINATIVE PARTNERSHIPS: THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL REALITIES OF A VALUE NETWORK ORGANIZATION
- Paper number
IAC-09.E6.3.1
- Author
Prof. Joseph Casas, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Marshall Space Flight Center, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Martin Kress, Von Braun Center for Science & Innovation , United States
- Year
2009
- Abstract
The “business” of governments has never been more challenging or complex as it is today. Government organizations are some of the most diverse organizations in the world operating multiple lines of business, tasked with providing technology, exploration, social, health, education and security programs, under technical, political, financial and legislative pressures. They usually work with a finite set of people, time and monetary resources to deliver these services, answer to a wide range of stakeholders, and still must remain completely transparent and accountable in terms of their received public trusted investments. Today in light of these obstacles, some government organizations, like NASA, are increasingly looking to a portfolio of alterative business models to help them optimize their existing resources, capitalize on technology developed by research and development organizations, build new high performance teams, improve mission responsiveness to their diverse stakeholders, and maximize the direct and indirect returns of investment to the public by providing rapid engineering solutions that enable innovative impacts to our technological and economic needs. In effect, new models are being assessed and implemented to meet future technology requirements, science applications, and increase positive impacts, reduce processes, and integrate the knowledge worker of tomorrow. This paper describes some of the key organizational and programmatic elements of such a new not for profit charitable trust alternative business model organization that is currently operating and associated with several ongoing government partnerships such as a lunar landing test bed, enhanced field deployable military robots and unique mission small satellite systems that are all being performed in space and technology demonstrations within collaborative project activities. A goal of this organization is to increase a sustainable synergy among government, private, industry, academic and entrepreneurial organizations through the use of an internal and external value network approach to conducting collaborative applied research, technology demonstrations and product deployment. The paper provides an understanding of the major upfront organizational considerations, as well as many of the implementation elements for several examples of ongoing research and technology demonstration projects. As importantly this paper highlights the need to upgrade and advance business management operational practices, as well as the supporting technology to execute the programs of tomorrow. In addition, the paper defines the desired project outcome results and their potential tangible and intangible value proposition impacts on the value networks of other space and innovation communities.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)