Critical Success Factors for Crowdsourcing with Virtual Environments to Unlock Innovation

Abstract

Systems Engineering (MBSE), crowdsourcing, and virtual environments can enhance collaboration. This study focused on finding critical success factors, using the Delphi method, allowing virtual environments and MBSE to produce needed feedback and enhance the process. A host of technologies and concepts holds the key for reducing development time linked to real warfighter evaluation and need. Innovations in MBSE, networking, and virtual environment technology can enable collaboration among the designers, developers, and end users, and can increasingly be utilized for warfighter crowdsourcing (Smith & Vogt, 2014). The innovative process can link ideas generated by warfighters, using game-based virtual environments in combination with the ideas, ranking, and filtering of the greater engineering staff. The DoD, following industry's lead in crowdsourcing, can utilize the critical success factors and methods developed in this research to reduce the time needed to develop and field critical defense systems. Innovative use of virtual environments and crowdsourcing can increase the usefulness of weapon systems to meet the real needs of the true stakeholders-the warfighters.The DoD, as a whole, has begun looking for efficiency by employing innovation, crowdsourcing, MBSE, and virtual environments (Zimmerman, 2015). Industry has led the way with innovative use of crowdsourcing for design and idea generation. Many of these methods utilize the public at large. However, this study will focus on crowdsourcing that uses warfighters and the larger DoD engineering staff, along with MBSE methodologies. This study focuses on finding the critical success factors, or key elements, and developing a process (framework) to allow virtual environments and MBSE to continually produce feedback from key stakeholders throughout the design cycle, not just at the beginning and end of the process. The proposed process has been developed based on feedback from a panel of experts using the Delphi method. The Delphi method, created by RAND in the 1950s, allows for exploration of solutions based on expert opinion (Dalkey, 1967). This study utilized a panel of 20 experts in modeling and simulation (M&S). The panel was a cross section of Senior Executive Service, senior Army, Navy, and DoD engineering staff, and academics with experience across the range of virtual environments, M&S, MBSE, and human systems integration (HSI). The panel developed critical success factors in each of the five areas explored: MBSE, HSI, virtual environments, crowdsourcing, and the overall process. HSI is an important part of the study because virtual environments can enable earlier detailed evaluation of warfighter integration in the system design.Many researchers have conducted studies that looked for methods to make military systems design and acquisition more fruitful. A multitude of studies conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has also investigated the failures of the DoD to move defense systems from the early stages of conceptualization to fini...

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