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Ledx Conference

Air University’s Innovation Accelerator (AUiX) invites you to the world-class educational experience of the highly anticipated LEDx Strategy (Leadership Educational Development eXperience: Strategy) conference on Wednesday, 18 OCT 2023.

AUiX: IGNITE Talk, Montgomery

Everyone has an origin story, so does AUiX. IGNITE’s moto is “Enlight us but make it quick.” An Ignite presentation is exactly 5 minutes with 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds!

Learning from Failures: Lessons from Air Power Innovators and Star Wars Heroes

Embrace the dark side of failure and use it as a tool for learning and growth. By doing so, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a Jedi master of innovation.

“Innovation and Failure: Navigating the ‘Fail Fast’ Approach with AUiX”

Innovation and failure often go hand in hand. However, failing fast is hard—like training to be a Jedi: it takes discipline, perseverance, and a willingness to learn from your mistakes. But let’s be real, most of us are more like Jar Jar Binks than Luke Skywalker—we stumble through “innovation” until we get it right, or fail. What if there was a force like the Jedi Order, dedicated to passing on the lessons learned from their failures to help Airmen innovators navigate the treacherous landscapes of funding, contracting, networking, and partnerships? With AUiX, it is possible to tap into this force while mitigating risks on the dark side.

Project Flashpoint: Air Refueling Logistic Reimagined

Imagine you just bought your first Tesla and are planning a road trip to show it off to your family. Your bags are packed, and you need to plan one stop to re-charge along the way. Unfortunately, you must send an email request directly to the Tesla Charging Office to reserve a Supercharger at a specific location for a specific time, and duration. The office then assigns you a “low priority.” Subsequently, all Superchargers are occupied at that time by other higher priorities. Your trip is canceled. Now, imagine you are planning to send a squadron of F-22s across the country for a training mission. Would you believe a similar process applies to your necessary air refueling (AR)? Unsurprisingly, an AR request for a training mission like this can also go unsupported. It is 2023, and planning to charge your Tesla is actually seamless from phone app to in-car touchscreen. There must be a better way for the Air Force to do this, right?

A Force to Shape the Future

“In dealing with the future, at least for the purpose at hand, it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent ‘right’.” – (Alvin Toffler, from Future Shock)

Collaboration and Mentorship in the World of Innovation

One of the greatest challenges to innovation is stagnation, an inability to think beyond one’s own perception and experience to create transformative and impactful solutions. A quick search on the web yields countless articles emphasizing the need for constant collaboration lest innovators find themselves in stale cycles of monotony, thus diminishing their credibility of being innovative in an ever evolving world. A lesser discussed, but equally viable — dare we say necessary — implementation is that of mentorship.

Project PELLA: A Dynamic Initiative to Expose, Engage and Enrich the Lives of Students During the Most Critical Year

There is no shortage of information on the critical need to provide students with meaningful, early and on-going exposure to the rapidly evolving fields of STEM. From the highest levels of leadership in Alabama, there is urgency to improve and increase learning of these subjects within schools across the state. With more and more jobs, and even our mere way of engaging daily becoming increasingly technical, students who lack experience in these areas will be left behind in their ability to find substantive employment. Additionally, we must ask ourselves, “what potential contribution does society miss by not investing heavily in those who will, inevitably, assume leadership roles – with or without adequate preparation.” Across the organization, AUiX lives by a nonnegotiable standard that to whom much is given, much is required. Through various social innovation efforts, AUiX aspires to be a conduit of change not only in the Air Force community, but also in the lives of these future leaders. 

So, you’ve got an innovative idea; Now what?

Hiring a project management firm, sitting back and watching might be an option. If it isn’t and you’re going to run with it yourself, read on.

Project Praxeum: Our Journey of Education Transformation

Our systems of education are built on priorities and processes from the industrialization of the 20th century. The previous need for human capabilities such as fluent information regurgitation and performance of many low-level tasks is becoming extinct. The time to redefine the function of education is now.
– Jeremy VanEgmond