CIOERT Mission

Apply disciplined innovation to continually improve, extend, and fortify NOAA’s exploration, research, and operational capabilities.

Disciplined innovation involves:

  • Focus on needs that are important to NOAA;
  • Create value for NOAA quickly;
  • Identify “innovation champions” to lead each project;
  • Create innovation teams to develop a team-based approach to innovation;
  • Align the CI partners to systematically produce high‑value innovations for NOAA.

CIOERT mission objectives engage teams of managers, scientists, and engineers and include:

Design and develop new paradigms for innovation. CIOERT will facilitate collaboration among academic scientists, technical research organizations, NOAA and other Federal researchers, and industry. One of the capabilities that CIOERT brings to NOAA is the business model developed and practiced by CIOERT partner SRI: the “discipline of innovation” (Carlson and Wilmot 2006). CIOERT will work with its primary customer — NOAA — to identify needs in ocean exploration, research, and technology development, and develop an approach to address these needs. CIOERT will execute a “Notion to Ocean©” innovation plan to efficiently transform ideas and concepts into operational products and processes.

Provide affordable exploration. CIOERT will improve the cost-efficiency and effectiveness of in situ approaches to exploration and thereby expand opportunities for shelf frontier exploration and research. Affordability considerations include not only the initial cost of exploration and instrumentation technology, but also the cost of operation, and data yield per unit effort, among other mission‑specific considerations.

Develop and apply next generation of ocean sampling. CIOERT will replace destructive, inaccurate, and inefficient ocean sampling systems with minimally invasive, accurate, precise, and efficient sampling systems. We will draw on a variety of existing sampling methods from the basic science bench-top, regulatory, biomedical, and commercial communities, and seek to adapt those technologies for ocean use. This emulates the current paradigm shift at NASA towards the use of adapting existing technology for particular applications. De novo instrument development will be a prime directive only where no relevant technology currently exists.

Share experiences and knowledge. CIOERT will engage the nation in our endeavors by sharing the exploration experience, and the excitement of discovery with stakeholders and the world.