On November 29-30, 2018, in Washington, D.C., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem. The workshop was requested by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of the Chief Technologist with the goal of identifying actionable and implementable initiatives that could build on NASA's current innovation culture to reach a future state that will ensure the agency's continued success in the evolving aerospace environment. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

“The new world is one based on knowledge. Lean KM offers a practical approach to Knowledge Management, filled with historical references and interesting stories. It brought back wonderful memories of NASA.”—Dr. Edward J Hoffman, Former NASA CKO and Director of the NASA Academy of Program, Project, & Engineering Leadership (APPEL), CEO Knowledge Strategies LLC Lecturer, Columbia University, Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Lean Knowledge Management Helped Change NASA’s Culture and It Can Do the Same for Your Organization. NASA suffered three human spaceflight tragedies and Lean Knowledge Management was a major tool that helped NASA management implement massive cultural changes. Traditional knowledge management is too often regarded as overly complicated or a wasteful bureaucratic exercise, but Lean Knowledge Management can become a critical component for your organization to operate effectively, efficiently and safely. Lean Knowledge Management simplifies the process by: Clearly defining your organization’s key employees, Filtering the enormous amount of internal “information” into “critical knowledge”. Utilizing a myriad of resources to get this critical knowledge to the people who need it most - the very people that can make your organization successful. Repetitive mistakes and failures can cost an organization millions of dollars in lost revenue, scrap, and even lawsuits. Lean Knowledge Management strips away the academic jargon and implements a practical, cost-effective, organic program emphasizing lessons of the past. Knowledge is free! Your hard-earned corporate knowledge is right in front of you, why risk losing it and having to pay for it all over again? Knowledge is power! Lean Knowledge Management is a structured plan to harness that power for your organization.

This book is in full-color - other editions may be in grayscale (non-color). The hardback version is ISBN 9781680920512 and the paperback version is ISBN 9781680920505. The NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Handbook (NASA/SP-2014-3705) is the companion document to NPR 7120.5E and represents the accumulation of knowledge NASA gleaned on managing program and projects coming out of NASA's human, robotic, and scientific missions of the last decade. At the end of the historic Shuttle program, the United States entered a new era that includes commercial missions to low-earth orbit as well as new multi-national exploration missions deeper into space. This handbook is a codification of the "corporate knowledge" for existing and future NASA space flight programs and projects. These practices have evolved as a function of NASA's core values on safety, integrity, team work, and excellence, and may also prove a resource for other agencies, the private sector, and academia. The knowledge gained from the victories and defeats of that era, including the checks and balances and initiatives to better control cost and risk, provides a foundation to launch us into an exciting and healthy space program of the future.

On November 29-30, 2018, in Washington, D.C., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem. The workshop was requested by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of the Chief Technologist with the goal of identifying actionable and implementable initiatives that could build on NASA's current innovation culture to reach a future state that will ensure the agency's continued success in the evolving aerospace environment. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

For almost twenty years, The Memory Jogger? has been helping organizations improve their daily procedures, systems, quality, costs, and yields. With more than five million copies sold worldwide, this proven on-the-job reference tool is perfect for providing your teams with practical instructions on basic quality tools and examples of problem-solving techniques.

"On November 29-30, 2018, in Washington, D.C., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held the Workshop on the Continuous Improvement of NASA's Innovation Ecosystem. The workshop was requested by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of the Chief Technologist with the goal of identifying actionable and implementable initiatives that could build on NASA's current innovation culture to reach a future state that will ensure the agency's continued success in the evolving aerospace environment. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop"--Publisher's description

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding. To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in "How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context. Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements. The author illustrates the teambuilding process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror. Free downloadable resources will help you: Identify your teammates’ innate personalities Diagram your culture (And compare it to your customer’s) Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired!) and Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you. Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.

Just after 9:00 a.m. on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart and was lost over Texas. This tragic event led, as the Challenger accident had 17 years earlier, to an intensive government investigation of the technological and organizational causes of the accident. The investigation found chilling similarities between the two accidents, leading the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to conclude that NASA failed to learn from its earlier tragedy. Despite the frequency with which organizations are encouraged to adopt learning practices, organizational learning—especially in public organizations—is not well understood and deserves to be studied in more detail. This book fills that gap with a thorough examination of NASA’s loss of the two shuttles. After offering an account of the processes that constitute organizational learning, Julianne G. Mahler focuses on what NASA did to address problems revealed by Challenger and its uneven efforts to institutionalize its own findings. She also suggests factors overlooked by both accident commissions and proposes broadly applicable hypotheses about learning in public organizations.