Page 51 - Cyber Warnings

The Great Tech Transfer A Success Story in Innovation

Solving business challenges often requires innovation, but fostering creativity and growing new
technologies is a challenge in itself. Creating new services and products is a problem that
causes most organizations to struggle.

According to a McKinsey & Company study, one key to successfully creating new solutions is
effective senior leadership and a corporate culture focused on innovation.

Success depends not only on executive leadership that encourages innovation, but also on that
which manages, tracks and measures its progress as a core element in a company's growth
strategy.

“94 percent of senior executives say that people and corporate culture are the most important
drivers of innovation.”- McKinsey & Company

Some organizations are getting it right. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory (PNNL) (operated by Battelle) fostered creation of the technology behind
DarkLight, an artificial intelligence-driven cybersecurity analytics and automation platform.

DarkLight was commercialized by Champion Technology Company, who now counts PNNL
among its users.

Like many organizations, PNNL faced the challenge of analyzing growing volumes of security
data without enough human talent to make sense of it. Champion and PNNL collaborated to
develop DarkLight, which is now in use at the Lab.

This helped reduce the cost and demands on resources inherent in developing new products
and services, and fostered the PNNL culture that rewards innovation.

“Champion’s collaboration with PNNL has created a technology which is unique in its approach
to analytics in the cybersecurity space,” says PNNL’s Director of Innovation, Rosemarie
Truman. “DarkLight captures the analytic tradecraft and reasoning of the cyber analyst to create
automated and predictive courses of action.

This automated response combats the growing shortage of analysts in the industry while putting
an emphasis on the security specialist’s knowledge and encapsulating what senior analysts
already know.”

Achieving Success with a Tech Transfer

Successfully transferring technology to an outside vendor to commercialize new tools and
services requires executive buy-in at every level.

51 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine January 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide