In April 2024, United States Special Operations Command’s (USSOCOM) Directorate of Science and Technology (S&T) Futures and UK Strategic Command (UKStratCom) hosted the fifteenth Innovation Foundry event (IF15) at the BT HQ in London, UK. Under the theme, “Smart Cities: Future Challenges for SOF”, the event explored the challenges of physical and remote SOF operations in a range of future complex smart cities scenarios.
As the second international event in the series, IF15 brought together military practitioners, industry, academia, national laboratories, and futurists to explore and ideate around future smart city scenarios and missions. Barry Kirby from K Sharp was one of the experts selected to bring Human Factors and smart towns experience.
Over a week, Barry participated in a series of design thinking exercises to envision the potential future technological and operating environment, and then took on the roles of SOF operators of the future to develop concepts that innovatively addressed challenging mission tasks. Specifically Barry focused on the role of Uncrewed Systems Operators and explored just how they would operate in a Smart City environment. These concepts address problem areas that may impact SOF forces and operations in the 2035 timeframe in interconnected smart cities. Deliverables for the event included preliminary capability concepts targeting the defined problem areas which may impact SOF forces and operations in the 2035 timeframe in interconnected smart cities.
Senior leadership from the UK and the US attended the IF15 outbrief including representatives from Science & Technology, USSOCOM, and UK Strategic Command.
