Importance of Innovation and Transformation In History

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1. According to Murray, what factors contribute to successful innovation? Unsuccessful innovation?

One factor contributing to unsuccessful innovation a mass Stakhanovite-like* operation at that service's doctrine center, a program in which the entire staff, from the commander to the lowliest enlisted person, are working twelve hours a day, six days a week, to realize the service chief's vision of innovation.
That is unfortunate; it is inconceivable that any valuable thinking, much less progress toward substantial innovation, could be taking place under such conditions.

It is the set of attitudes and cultures that characterizes U.S. military services at the beginning of what appears to be an extended period of peace. These are attitudes and cultures of a sort that may make real innovation, when it counts, impossible. These attitudes and cultures stifle innovation.

According to Murray for successful innovation it is required -innovation that rested on a careful analysis of the past-suggests that many of the problems that confronted American and British air forces were self-inflicted, arising from contempt for the lessons of the past (even the immediate past) in a rush to get on with the future. In short careful analysis of the part is important for successful innovation.

According to Murray those cultures that encouraged discussion, study and honest experimentation let to innovation. There is another crucial element in the innovation equation-the culture of military organizations. The services that innovated with considerable success in the interwar period possessed internal cultures that encouraged debate, study, and honest experimentation in their preparations for war.

The services that innovated with considerable success in the interwar period possessed internal cultures that encouraged debate, study, and honest experimentation in their preparations for war.

In effect, it is a benchmark against which one can measure the success or otherwise of innovation in the trends and the attitudes of its officer corps and senior leadership as to their likely receptiveness to innovation and the major conceptual changes to come in the next decades.

For successful innovation even though these facilities cannot replicate the conditions of combat, they do provide a framework for preparing for combat in a way that is superior by an order of magnitude to anything available in previous decades. This state of affairs is encouraging, because the historical record suggests that at the heart of innovation lie discrete, ...