Open Innovation for a NASA Architecture Library

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) uses open innovation, or “crowdsourcing”,
to access the global public to find ideas, concepts, designs, or solutions that meet a previously unmet need
possibly resulting in significant advances in performance. The Center of Excellence for Collaborative
Innovation was launched at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
This is both a non-traditional method of innovation and a non-traditional method of outreach to the public
to involve them in space technologies and programs. It has been used often for software development and
new hardware technology. In this case we applied it to innovate with systems engineering tools for creating
space architectures. The challenge was sponsored by NASA Engineering and Safety Center Systems
Engineering Technical Fellow as part of a program for NASA’s adoption of MBSE. It was a trial to see if there
would be as much participation or quality submissions with this more specialized topic and skill.
The challenge sought space architecture representations and decompositions to create a library of modeled
parts in a system modeling language (SysML). Mission architects mostly start from scratch to build model
elements representing the functional and physical architecture of a system in SysML. There are a few
beginning libraries, but these are also local to a program or group. A common library will save system
engineers a large amount of time, will allow project stakeholders to recognize common graphics and quickly
understand the architecture options.
The challenge was promoted internationally, especially through professional organizations and universities
with a systems engineering focus. It was open for 4 months, purposefully over the winter holiday break
time to allow participants extra time outside of work or school. The challenge was designed so that
expertise in space hardware was not necessary but getting to play with models of space architecture could
provide motivation to participate.
We did not receive as many entries as other broader outreach challenges, but the ones we received were
extremely thorough and high quality. Solutions came from individuals and teams, students and professional
consultants from the United States and Europe. We learned a few lessons about how to engage with the
public and what characteristics of a problem result in good crowdsourcing results. The outreach challenge
produced several useful ideas and modeled space elements, and the group will be engaging the winners to
learn more about their new approaches.