GROWING A NETWORK AND EXPANDING ENGAGEMENT

122 N Square Innovators Network fellows

337 Active members of the N Square Mighty Network

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Individuals and organizations in the nuclear field tackle complex, dynamic problems on which no single actor can make progress alone. But at the time of N Square’s launch there was little to no focus on collaborative innovation, making it difficult for anyone to see their work as part of or connected to a larger, more diverse, and more powerful system of effort. We set out to counter this disconnection by fostering a larger sense of shared vision, community, and process—a new ecology of problem-solving—within the field.

An Emergent Strategy

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Building a diverse, collaborative network of nuclear professionals and experts in other fields was not our first step, nor was it something we could do without first better understanding the culture, the structure, and the complexity of the issue space—the system—we aimed to influence. In our first two years we primarily acted as a re-grantor, making seed investments in innovative projects that other funders might have considered too speculative or “fringe.” Our role was to take risks that are sometimes difficult for established foundations to justify. Yet that work of re-granting ultimately proved unsatisfying; it felt that we were funding at the event level3 rather than in ways designed to shift systemic structures or mental models.

Events Patterns

Systemic Structures

Mental Models

This observation coincided with several other factors that shifted both staff and funders’ perception of N Square’s value to the field:

We published the Opportunity Guide and people put it to use. The Opportunity Guide was designed not for nuclear expert audiences but for innovators in other domains— data scientists, neuroscientists, game designers, educators, anthropologists, engineers, and others— who were largely unaware that their expertise could be invaluable in solving nuclear challenges. The guide broke the nuclear problem space into “verbs” that correspond to leading-edge work our target audiences were already doing to communicate, educate, innovate, negotiate, monitor, verify, detect, prevent, deter, disarm, and secure, providing natural points of connection.

To our surprise, not only did colleagues from other fields see themselves in our call to action but so did political scientists and nuclear engineers at Sandia National Laboratories in both Albuquerque and Livermore; ditto colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. What we all held in common, as it turned out, was a mission to develop a more diverse community of practice that would benefit from the knowledge transfer that happens at the intersections between differing disciplines and professional domains. Clearly, we all sought a new kind of network

We sponsored a live-streamed series on the Reinventors Network loosely based on the Opportunity Guide.

Co-hosted by futurist and former Wired Magazine editor Peter Leyden and N Square managing director Erika Gregory, the series aimed to illustrate how bringing people from many different disciplines together to lend their perspectives on innovative ideas around nuclear security could be a gamechanger in this space. The Reinvent Nuclear Security series comprised six topics:

• Engaging Millennials

• The (Nuclear) Future We Want

• Game-Changing Technologies

• An Alternative Future for the National Labs

• Recruiting Next-Gen Innovators

• Expanding the Role of “Outside” Organizations

Each episode featured examples of the very audiences we sought to attract, from innovators in sensor technologies and the “internet of things” to faith leaders, material scientists, entertainers, and world-renowned futurists. Their own networks joined our viewership, proving our hypothesis that if we could get better at framing nuclear issues in ways that speak to target audiences they would indeed be willing to step into this issue space