Concepts Branch - Workshops - Naval Warfare Studies Institute
The Naval Postgraduate School Warfare Innovation Workshop is an innovation engine leveraging our strength – our operationally experienced students and defense-expert faculty – to address complex fleet issues and discover opportunities available through emerging technologies. Primary activities in NWSI Concepts are workshops and field experimentation.
Beginning in 2009, these NPS rapid concept generation activities have emerged in several different forms and formats such as the annual Warfare Innovation Continuum (WIC) Workshop. In the annual WIC Workshop small teams of early career engineers from industry, Navy labs, and academia join junior officers from NPS and other commands with diverse perspectives and experience to respond to a design challenge. Teams brief their best three or four concepts to sponsors, industry executives, and senior officers on the final morning of the workshop. These workshops have addressed maritime topics of interest such as countering self-propelled semi-submersibles and other maritime irregular challenges, undersea warfare, hybrid warfare in littoral environments, electromagnetic maneuver warfare, distributed maritime operations, cross-domain operations, logistics, and national resilience.
Primary Lines of Effort
1) Workshops
2) NWSI Facilitator Corps
3) Warfighter Driven Challenges
4) NPS Writers Room
Concept Generation
Tools of Warfighter-Centered Design (WCD)
NWSI Facilitator Corps
Email wiw@nps.edu to join the Corps!
- FACILITATOR GARAGE: the "Facilitator Garage" is an informal opportunity to brush up our skills and share tips and tools among facilitators. We plan to open the "Garage" two times a year going forward to "tinker" and sharpen our tools.
- FACILITATOR IMMERSION: an in-service opportunity for facilitators to become participants again an approach a complex military design challenge and prototype the workshop design of another member of the community.
- FACILITATOR SYNC: a regular drumbeat to touch base with others in this growing community who guide teams safely through the unknown as they address complex military challenges, and learn about upcoming facilitation opportunities and innovation seminars.
- THE LAUNCH: NWSI offered our first facilitator training in February 2023 with support from the NavalX Center for Adaptive Warfighting (CAW). Click here for more information - view recorded sessions and access materials!
Upcoming Workshops
WIC Workshop
22-25 September 2025
Like past years, our next Warfare Innovation Continuum (WIC) Workshop will address a complex military challenge that is "on the front lines" of Naval leadership agendas.
Recent Workshops
WIC Workshop
23-26 September 2024
WIC Workshop
18-21 September 2023
Future Hybrid Force
19-22 September 2022
DESIGN CHALLENGE: "How might the convergence of emerging technologies offer new operational concepts and force designs to create
a more effective and resilient naval, joint, and coalition force across the spectrum of conflict and in all domains?"
Teams engaged in the rapid concept generation process using tools of human-centered design, and these seeds of ideas will inform class projects, thesis work, and research across the NPS campus throughout FY23.
Workshop Outcomes
- Final Report
- Quick Look Report
- Workshop materials and outcomes are available on the NPS Events Portal.
Nimitz Research Group Workshop
21-24 March 2022
DESIGN CHALLENGE: “How might U.S. Pacific Fleet preserve the balance of power and, if necessary, defeat a near peer adversary in the Western Pacific?”
Quick Look Report available here - full report will be linked once complete.
Small teams of junior officers explored this future problem space and generated concepts of operations and employment to benefit the future Fleet. This warfare innovation workshop explored four key focus areas:
- Present combat power – maintain a highly capable Fleet/FMF in a high state of readiness
- How might activities such as exercises, tests, and demonstrations exhibit capability and capacity, actual and/or perceived?
- Strengthen alliances – deepen trust-based relationships and interoperability with partner nations
- How might INDOPACOM improve cooperative efforts (bi-lateral and multi-lateral) with critical partner nation militaries in the western Pacific via policies, procedures, and technologies?
- Improve posture – provide an adversary an unpredictable, complex, and confusing operational view and targeting problem
- How might commanders array their forces in a way that presents an adversary with a formidable but confusing view of U.S. and Partner capability, capacity, and intent?
- Integrate information operations – dominate the fight for information across the three dimensions of the information environment (physical, informational, and cognitive)
- How might emerging technologies, activities, and new models of understanding “human system integration” enhance a combatant commander's ability to shape the Information environment in order to compete with adversaries below the threshold of armed conflict?
Workshop Outcomes
"Hybrid Force 2045" Workshop
20-23 September 2021
DESIGN CHALLENGE: How might emerging technologies, new operational concepts, and alternative fleet designs contribute to a more effective naval force across the spectrum from competition to conflict? How do the alternative fleet designs enhance the effectiveness and resilience of joint, combined and coalition forces across all domains?
This workshop was held as a Naval Postgraduate School Thesis & Research Week activity to apply emerging technologies to shape the way we fight. Nearly 130 participants served on one of six Concept Generation Teams, offered their services as a Mentor, or participated as an Observer.