ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that systematic innovation can provide similar benefits to small navies, provided such navies can adjust their formal and informal structures to enable innovation throughout the organisation. It is important to note at the outset that innovation has become something of a catchphrase in political and popular discourse. The term 'systematic innovation' is used here to describe an approach to organisational management, derived from industrial economics, which promotes user, lead user and open-source problem-solving models. The chapter shows enhancing network performance, open-source innovation provides an important component in a framework that unfamiliar partners brought together in multi-agency networks to tackle complex security threats can use to more coherently and fruitfully collaborate. Such networks can take various forms, address diverse challenges, from piracy to economic collapse, and incorporate actors both within and clearly distinct from military form, shape and function. Chiefly economic reasons provide justification both for the argument being mounted here and its timing.
