CARLISLE BARRACKS, Pa. (Aug. 21, 2026) — The Army trains its Soldiers to follow orders precisely and manage risk. From Aug. 17–21, 2026, at the U.S. Army War College, the Innovation Champion Course asked something almost contradictory of its students: take a good idea and be willing to fight for it past skeptical leaders, past friction, past the moment most innovations quietly fail.
That failure point has a name, borrowed from Silicon Valley rather than military doctrine: "the chasm," from Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm." Students and instructors have been testing if this framework built for consumer tech adoption can assist Army Soldiers to get their own best ideas off the ground.
"I think for me, the way I see it is the ability to change and to effect change within an organization," said Kevin Boyce, one of the course's instructors, when asked what defines a successful Innovation Champion. "It's getting an entire organization to think outside the box and incorporate different types of innovation models."
Kristan Wheaton, professor of strategic futures at the U.S. Army War College, built the program around the idea that Army innovation efforts can come to a stand still not for lack of good ideas, but for lack of a structure to carry those ideas past initial buy-in into widespread use, the same gap Moore identified in commercial markets more than three decades ago.
Students spent the week wrestling with that gap, working through the framework and translating their efforts into concrete plans to take back to their organizations.
Capt. Michael Tummolo, an officer based at Fort Hood, has noticed during his career that the Army has adopted one promising digital platform after another, without always getting the payoff those tools promise.
The chasm, in his view, isn't a lack of technology. It's the absence of a structure to make that technology useful to the people and organizations who need it most.
"I think that's the chasm," Tummolo said. "It's the ability to understand the capability of the product we're using now which, for example, is One Brief (a collaborative digital briefing platform) and not only understand its capability, but build from the top down, build those left and right limits, and build the structure to feed the machine."
Capt. Eleanore Manning, an officer with the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska, found a different kind of leverage in the course: speed.
"I think the easiest, quickest win from this class is really just the AI tools that they give us," Manning said. "There are so many more tools out there that we just do not discuss that can really help us save so much time, even just for making a PowerPoint presentation."
For Manning, that efficiency is itself a strategy for navigating a culture that doesn't always welcome fast change. "This class really gives us kind of a toolbox to get around that very rigid process, especially in a time where we're expected to change rapidly, in a culture where we oftentimes have leaders who are not always ready to move at that pace," she said.
Sgt. Maj. Cher Nuckols, who works in the Office of the Chief of Army Reserve, came into the course from a different perspective. Sitting alongside officers from across the active-duty Army, she said, made clear how much of an opportunity gap exists between the Reserve and the broader force, highlighting the difference in access to advanced platforms, studies and resources.
"My philosophy is: why work harder when you can work smarter?" Nuckols said.
That philosophy is now shaping her own plans back home. Nuckols said she hopes to bring the Assistant Chief of Army Reserve’s office information on what she learned, exposing them to the innovation-lab environment she encountered during the course.
It's a small example of the exact dynamic the course is built to produce: an idea, tested in a classroom at Carlisle Barracks, crossing its own chasm into a Reserve office hundreds of miles away.