Discontinuous Innovation and the Defense Innovation Cycle

This paper extends the concept of transilience mapping developed by Abernathy and Clark (1984) to model the cycle of innovation in the United States Department of Defense (DOD). Here, transilience is defined as the capacity of an innovation to influence the established technological paradigm in the DOD, which includes both the accepted methods of value creation and the resulting dominant designs. Examples of reinforcing and disruptive innovation in the DOD are mapped to the four modes of innovation (i.e., niche, architectural, regular, and revolutionary), and the concept of a defense innovation cycle based on the emergence of new dominant designs is introduced. The analysis shows that the relationship between technological innovations and dominant designs over time is associated with the extent to which new innovations are either consistent or inconsistent with the technological paradigm.