Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document is dated 30 March 2010. The Defense Warning Office prepared it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It compares lone maverick inventors with corporate inventors who work in think tanks and other large organizations, focusing on unconventional energy and propulsion, including antigravity. It sorts inventors into five types. It concludes that formally trained mavericks (Types 3 and 4) are the most likely source of the next innovations. Untrained inventors are expected to contribute nothing substantial.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD compares lone “maverick” inventors with researchers working inside larger organizations in order to ask where major future breakthroughs are most likely to come from, especially in unconventional energy and propulsion. It concludes that the strongest candidates are technically trained, relatively independent, and flexible researchers working with some freedom from institutional constraint. Because that preferred profile closely resembles the kind of researcher who appears to have authored or shaped much of the broader AAWSAP DIRD effort, the document reflects a notable methodological circularity, validating the program’s operational model rather than neutrally assessing the innovation ecosystem.
UNCLASSIFIED/ f FOR OFFI@IAL ~SI! 8HL'I
Maverick Inventor Versus Corporate Inventor: Where Will
the Next Major Innovations Arise?
Introduction
Technological innovation has been advanced by several sectors of human
society and via a diverse set of circumstances. In the early 20th century, the
solitary maverick inventor was responsible for the bedrock of most of today's
industrial and commercial enterprises. As these enterprises grew larger, they
could afford their own research and development departments, tasking them
with developing products and processes aimed at increasing the market share
of the parent company. Generally speaking, as time went on these types of
enterprises became less hotbeds of true innovation than places where
improvements to the current technologies were tightly managed. Such
management became stultifying for many inventors wishing to produce true
innovation, and these mavericks shunned the commercial research agencies
and went off to carry out their own brand of research.
Another institution where true innovation is fostered is the university.
University research as it exists today started in Europe only in the 18th
century. The bulk of the discoveries in science leading to technologica l
innovation came from university research laboratories in the 19th and early
20th centuries. Currently there is considerable controversy surrounding the
degree to which research at universities is free from external influences,
whether from within the university, from the greater scientific community, or
from public and/or private agencies that fund the research. As university
salaries and expenses go up, there is increasing reliance on external funding
sources, the majority of which wish to exert some influence over the type of
research they are underwriting.
Human aggression and human needs gave birth to two additional areas of
innovation. As governments became embroiled in conflicts, they found the
need to fund "think tanks" for the purposes of stimulating scientific
developments that could aid war efforts. As well, the needs of their
constituents for food, shelter, health care, energy, economic development,
space exploration, and so forth demanded the establishment of government
funded agencies to perform research and produce policy. To be effective,
military planners needed access to the most innovative technologies in all
areas of endeavor, not just armaments, and so established their own research
and development departments.
Circumstances determine the temporal requirement for innovation. Modern
versions of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse {wars, pestilence, lies,
famine/death: read conflict, environment, economy, health) pretty well sum
up the major stimulants that foster innovation. Fortunately, human society-at
least so far-has shown a remarkable propensity for inventing methods of
overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
This paper concentrates on two areas of technological innovation where
solutions have been particularly hard to come by-namely energy and
UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'P81t err1e1At ~SI! er~L'I
iv Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.