Classified research and academic institutions often aren’t mentioned in the same breadth. One is secretive, and the other thrives on openness and sharing.
The Naval Postgraduate School is trying to become the conduit that connects these two often divergent efforts.
Kevin Smith, the vice provost for research and innovation, said NPS is planning to address these sometimes opposite goals through its new Naval Innovation Center, which former Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced in December 2022.
“It’s not NPS’s Innovation Center, and that’s very important to understand. The reason why it’s going to take place at NPS and be co-located with NPS is because the Secretary of the Navy understood the value of having our student population — the experienced officers that have come from the fleet or the Marine force and are going to go back into service — come in with problems, and then they’re going to go back and try to address those problems. It’s a very unique student body we have, in addition our world class faculty, but they’re all driven toward that common mission,” Smith said during an interview at the recent West 2025 conference sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute. “It’s a very unique institution that can really support the kind of innovation the Navy wants to see accomplished to address the capability gaps that we’re currently seeing.”
The Naval Innovation Center will host students and partners from across the Naval research and development ecosystem — from industry, other academic institutions and even allies.
This means the center will have to support different levels of access to data and research.
Scott Bischoff, the chief information officer at NPS, said the underlying infrastructure will need to be in place to address those needs.
“I’m talking about multiple levels of classification, and we have to make sure that the building’s set up for the room we need there. The basics with AV and collaboration are going to be very important. We want to build in adaptability and make sure we don’t get stuck two years after we open the doors,” Smith said during the interview, which appeared on Ask the CIO. “Not only is the Naval Innovation Center well down the planning stage, but we’re also doing a big campus modernization, so we’re kind of got it on both sides. But it’s the same thought process with the buildings — we have to make sure we don’t get stuck with old technology.”
Research demands increasing
Smith said moving into the classified space brings a host of challenges, such as ensuring its cloud services are at Impact Level 6 or higher.
“It’s also about what resources do we need to keep everything cool that’s on-premise — there’s more of that on the classified side. We’re starting to run into heating and cooling issues in some of the older buildings.
“That is the big one,” he said. “Researchers are bringing in hardware now, a lot of GPUs and our we’ve got a big High Performance Computing Center. It is very full right now.”
Retired Navy Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau, the NPS president, said striking the balance of access to information and ensuring classified data stays with the right people is a constant challenge for NPS.
Rondeau said the recent movie “Oppenheimer” is a good example of this challenge.
“There was a lot of discussion that was at high levels of great intellectual work in electrical engineering, physics and all those things. That was the dialog of the classroom and of the open conversations, and actually the arguments. There was lots of sharpening of the edge, and they had to work through the basics of it — the engineering and the concepts in the physics. Then they went over to the classified side as to what they were doing,” she said. “That upfront conversation is unique in the sense of the democratic world — of how you learn and educate you have to make an exchange of ideas. That is part of the excitement of it, that there’s energy behind it … and that comes way before it is classified. Then you go into the world that is classified as to how you apply it.”
While NPS doesn’t have a large student population working in the classified world, Rondeau said as the institution does more with cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, the need for classified capabilities may increase.
“If you’re interested in an application, which is what I want to have our students think about all the time, then how are you applying your knowledge with open architecture and access to all kinds of information? Applications become a sensitive area, so you need to put that in a classified environment. The basic knowledge you must have,” she said. “But once you start to practice that and put it into an applied form, that becomes, at times, very sensitive. So you need to have a classified environment to talk about the actual solutions and applications many times, that’s really important. What’s interesting right now is that the United States truly believes in the importance of allies and partners. So how you think about classification with international partners is really now a large topic of many people and many leaders in trying to understand how you share better with your international partners.”
A maturing concept for the Navy
This is where the new Naval Innovation Center can play a bigger role. While it remains in the planning stages, Smith said the building designs are mature at this point, and they’re looking at budgets and final designs for how everything will fit into the building.
“The Naval Innovation Center itself is still a concept we’re developing. The operating model — we’re preparing for what that might look like at NPS, and how NPS can support it and leverage it as well for the education of our students,” he said. “Now, while that’s going on, NPS has been looking for the last few years at how do we start creating more of that innovation ecosystem within our own efforts. We’re doing a lot more interdisciplinary types of work. We’ll pull faculty and students from different communities, different departments, together to work on some problems that we’ve identified internally, that we have the capacity to work on. Now we have an NPS innovation operating concept that goes from concept development through potential prototyping, some field experimentation, as well as what would the acquisition process look like to put something like that into practice.”
Under the current plan, students will apply to the innovation center and, if accepted, be part of a team for six to 12 months that includes NPS faculty and staff and work on specific problems or challenges.
Smith said the innovation center, in many ways, is an entirely new concept.
“It’s really to take something that’s already got a little bit of maturation to it and try to take that further,” he said. “At the same time, we’re not going to be building large programs or large prototypes in the center. It’s really about, how do you take something from an early stage and mature it with the folks that have that understanding of how it’s going to be used in actual practice and get it to a point where it is ready to scale. Then hand it off to another organization, either within a Navy office or an industry partner, to scale it and then be able to provide that to the fleet.”
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