Notice

Competition summary: Defence People Innovation Challenge

Updated 9 April 2018

This Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) competition seeks to introduce innovative solutions to how we manage our people, both military and civilian.

1. Background

People are central to Defence capabilities. We employ 195,520 full time military and civilians and 32,240 Part Time Reserves (as at 1 January 2018). We rely on the skills, commitment and professionalism of our people and place heavy demands on them. Recruiting, training and retaining the right mix of capable and motivated people is essential to success both on operations and at home.

Spending on People accounted for around 30% out of £36 billion Defence spending in 2016-17. Defence must continually keep its costs and activities under review to ensure that the best result is achieved with the resources available.This includes exploring all opportunities to consider how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our people and the supporting processes, behaviours and cultures.

This challenge is intended to bring innovative thinking to bear on current issues, to the benefit of those developing and delivering human resource support now. We are seeking to identify ideas, from the external marketplace, that will make Defence think and act differently, and so respond better to our challenges and seize the opportunities that we might otherwise miss. To maximise success, we want to encourage proposals which both address the challenges and consider how to integrate and exploit the benefits within current Defence structures, ways of working and processes. We also wish to encourage collaborative working amongst those with potential solutions to make best use of your experience of relevant human resources practice and novel enabling technology.

2. People Challenges

The Defence People Innovation Challenge has five areas of focus:

2.1 Recruitment

Solutions that will help Defence recruit the right mix of capable, resilient and motivated people, by enabling us to optimise our processes, exploit our current management information and understand and engage with potential recruits – particularly young people, under-represented communities and those with specialist skills or knowledge.

2.2 Skills and Training

Solutions that will help Defence understand and track the knowledge, skills, experience and other attributes already available within our people, enable their development, both as individuals and collectively, to meet the needs of the organisation or for self-improvement, and better identify individuals for tasks or roles. We are particularly interested in solutions that provide approaches to more effectively deliver training outputs, reduce the time spent in training and drive efficiencies.

2.3 Retention

Solutions that will help Defence retain our people for longer, enabling us to recognise, utilise and exploit skills and experience more fully. We are particularly interested in solutions that increase our understanding of what drives people to stay, but also provide clear sign-posting of their choices within the organisation and which enables us to optimise the evidence base for policy decisions.

2.4 Motivation

Solutions that will help Defence improve engagement levels, ideally through empowerment, commitment and leadership. We would like to gain an understanding of the tools and techniques that would improve communication with all ranks, reaching groups that work remote from standard corporate systems, such as our Reserves, and that deliver messages that are trusted. We also want solutions that increase the sense of well-being and resilience.

2.5 Rehabilitation

Solutions that will promote, sustain and restore the optimal physical and mental wellbeing of Service Personnel. The complex nature of current and the future operating environments provide significant occupational and environmental stressors to Defence personnel and the challenges in providing the requisite supporting services continues to evolve. We are particularly interested in solutions which help us to mitigate the risk of musculoskeletal injury (MSKI) and support recovery, hence maintaining combat effectiveness and the ability of Service Personnel to deploy on operations.

3. Funding

The aim of the Defence People Challenge is to achieve exploitation of successful proposals within three years across all five sub-challenges. Up to £3 million will be available for this challenge in the first year with further funding available in future years.

4. Competition Close

The competition will open on Tuesday 27 March 2018 and close at midday on Wednesday16 May 2018. Proposals must be submitted to the Defence and Security Accelerator online.