Digital Disruption: Major General Copinger-Syme's Speech to the UK Strategic Command Inaugural...

"This is where our culture is so important – where some of our greatest strengths are in danger of becoming our defining vulnerabilities. We don’t have an innovation problem – quite the opposite, a thousand innovative flowers are blooming across Defence, whether in the Services, the DE&S or the DIO, the Ministry itself, or our peerless scientists in dstl. But we do have an ‘innovation adoption’ problem – we struggle to incorporate those innovations into our core capabilities and focus real investment on them. The old saying is ‘think big; start small; and be prepared to scale – or fail’. But we are bad at ‘scaling’ and we are simply awful at ‘failing’ old ideas to make way for new ones. As Liddell Hart used to say – ‘it’s not so hard getting a new idea into a military mind; but it’s very hard to get an old one out’. "