Security Lancaster & Lancaster University would like to invite you to attend the 2019 conference “Innovation Methodologies for Defence Challanges: Towards Practical Strategies" (IMDC).

The conference will take place at Lancaster University on the 26 - 28 February 2019.

Collaborative conversation is taking place between Security Lancaster; Saint PaulUniversity, Ottawa; Joint Special Forces University, Florida; Ministry of Defence, UK; Canadian Forces, Toronto; Birkbeck University, London and more. The conference will bring together some of the most distinguished defence practitioners, innovation specialists and scholars in the field coming from several NATO countries and partners.

This event aims primarily at facilitating exchanges of experiences in using innovation methodologies in practice and formalizing a network of professionals who are interested in innovation, doctrine, development and defence planning. It will cover a broad spectrum of topics, including new technologies, methods of thinking and broader global trends impacting on our security. You are fully encouraged to invite interested parties from your own networks and organizations.

IMDC is an opportunity for networking and creating collective knowledge through data bases, discussions and papers. The knowledge exchange will be workshops, social activities, Ted Talk style conversations that are both intergenerational, interdisciplinary and diverse. The general idea – is to invite participants that will disrupt our own echo-chamber and that is innovatively organized in a way that promotes an environment where the focus is on sharing knowledge across disciplines, with a deliberate balance of academic research, military practitioners and corporate thinkers.

Design thinking is currently emerging as a challenger to rationalist planning paradigms in the UK and European Defence organizations. Our intent – from an academic perspective – is to create a space at Lancaster University for defence practitioners (planners, commanders, defence scientists and such) to speak about how they use innovation methodologies for defence challenges to think differently about their world, in comparison to so-called conventional methodologies. A common trend across these methodologies is that they are all reflexive approaches. They include self-awareness in their inquiries in, in the form of design thinking, critical and post-structuralist philosophies, sstems thinking and so forth.

In February 2019, we are hoping for our academic engagement predominantly based upon ethnographic knowledge exchanges from practitioners who express ways in which (in the field) they have engaged with innovative methodologies out of curiosity and/ or necessity. This Lancaster IMDC promises to be an extremely useful space within which to share and learn about cutting edge methodologies and also learn from concrete examples of leaders, putting them into practice and experimenting with ideas in workshops over a three-day period