Innovation & Imagination

The unfortunate and unintended consequences of the additional post-9/11 assignments that have been vested in the world’s premier maritime law enforcement agency, the U.S. Coast Guard now finds itself overextended, short-staffed, and underfunded.

These additional assignments being placed on the Coast Guard include reallocating resources to the United States maritime borders, enforcing exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific, addressing ongoing issues in the Middle East, adapting to new Arctic challenges, and conducting recent high-seas vessel interdictions, while still being expected to maintain the same levels of safety patrols and Search & Rescue responsibilities it has historically provided here at home.

This is where the Division 7 Special Projects Group (SPG) concept was developed.

Supporting the establishment of the U.S. Coast Guard Innovation Program, the mandates in Force Design 2028, and the Commandant’s directive to foster a culture of continuous innovation and learning, the SPG has been established to provide, maintain, and support a collaborative, open-invitation think tank environment where skilled and talented people can share their personal and professional expertise on local issues that affect the safety and security of recreational boating in Western Long Island Sound.

To promote this Coast Guard-wide effort to increase efficiency and accelerate the process of turning innovative ideas or solutions into mission results, the SPG was created to provide an environment and structured framework that encourages the subject-matter experts among us to contribute their experience and know-how to small, individual projects with clearly defined beginnings and endpoints, thereby offering protection from the all-too-common occurrence of being “volunteered” to run an entire program because a single project someone participated in was so successful.

By bringing together creative and imaginative members in a decentralized, open dialogue framework that fosters collaborative brainstorming and the cross-pollination of ideas, the SPG ensures that the path from initial idea to meaningful impact remains clear and achievable by maintaining a nexus where leadership can directly request ideas from the group and the group can directly share ideas with leadership.