After a run of unsuccessful experiments, inventor Thomas Edison famously declared that he’d found hundreds of ways to not make a light bulb. An Air Force grant named after Edison and his fail-forward mindset allows Department of the Air Force scientists and engineers to design and execute their own experiments, building a culture that accepts failure as the first step of innovation.

  Capt. Kavi Muraleetharan, a developmental engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, leveraged a $75,000 Edison Grant to test possible improvements to aircraft engines.

  “We want to start exploring innovative, interesting ideas to improve their form factor and their efficiency,” he said. “We want to make something that could really transform how we develop and eventually field these technologies.”

  Before he could lead testing, Muraleetharan had to apply for the Edison Grant, justifying the experiment, planning field testing, and connecting with mentors—a requirement for the application that guarantees candidates will come away from the process with at least one win.

  “When applying to the grant, we have to identify senior military members to mentor and coach us along the way,” he said. “So, we start networking and building relationships with other technical and engineering scientists within the Air Force. I talked to a few of my civilian counterparts and they helped me put an amazing proposal in.”

  For candidates whose applications are accepted, they practice taking the lead on a project from the ground up.

  Muraleetharan used that freedom to develop and test an irregularly shaped rotating detonation engine, asking whether a change to the engine’s traditional circular shape could improve its efficiency.

  More efficiency could mean more speed or distance with less fuel, more energy with a smaller engine, or more capacity for weapons in an aircraft’s weapons bay, Muraleetharan said. Experimentation pits these hopes against the realities of physics and engineering.

  “How do we make it feasible?” Muraleetharan asked, listing some of the key questions of his grant proposal. “How do we decrease some of the thermal effects and some of the acoustic effects? And how do we get a feel of it within a weapon system to make it go faster, more efficiently and get the biggest power out of the limited fuels that we have?”

  His experiment is just one line of thought about faster, smarter ways to propel aircraft.

  “We like to go as fast as possible. We want to see what kind of interesting fuels we can use, so we don't have to rely on the same things that we're running low on,” Muraleetharan said.

  “We want to see what other thermodynamic cycles we can do to get the work potential we want to power aircraft. But detonation engines are just one hypothetical way to power an aircraft. We need to think outside the box: What are some other ways we can power our Air Force fleet in the future?”

  The beauty of the Edison Grant, according to Muraleetharan, is that outside-the-box thinking is rewarded whether the experiment succeeds or not.

  “The point of the Edison Grant is just to try something,” he said. “It's low risk but it could have high payoff. Recipients get the freedom and privilege to work on something innovative knowing that if it does turn out well, it can get funded further by other Air Force dollars. If it didn't turn out as we expected, we still learn a lot about how it feels to manage your own experimentation project and learn along the way.”

  By taking the highest risk acceptable with a relatively small budget, scientists and engineers can use the grant to get as much value out of a test that doesn’t work as one that goes as planned.

  “It is in the spirit, or the essence, of the Edison Grant for things to potentially fail—you learn a lot through failure,” Muraleetharan said.

  “We shouldn't shy away from that as we're gearing up towards whatever's next, improving our technologies and making awesome weapon systems. We need to fail. We need to figure out what works and we need to do it fast. That's what the Edison Grant does: it puts a sharp timeline on building an experiment and seeing what we learn from it.”

  The sharp timeline responds to the sense of urgency Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, Jr. encourages in his Accelerate Change or Lose call to action.

  “Everyone in the world is designing their own tool, their own trinket, their own technology and it is impressive how quickly technology has grown these last few years,” Muraleetharan said.

  “We have had a lot of commercial boom but we also have a lot of adversaries building up technology that we need to compete with.”

  Muraleetharan believes the Air Force is leading the way on thinking of how to fight the future fight and how technologically proficient Airmen are the leaders of that enterprise. Airmen with science and technology jobs or backgrounds can help with research and development or test and evaluation, he said, but they can also advise on the policies that the Air Force is enacting to rapidly build new technology.

  “We're trying to promote and define the culture of fail faster and speed with discipline,” Muraleetharan said.

  “We want to do the background work to make sure what we're doing is technologically feasible and potentially sound, and we test often, and test with purpose. If we find out something fails, we just need to redirect. And if we find that it works, we can build upon it.”

  Frequent, rapid tests and experiments show the agility of DAF science professionals and model the innovation, emphasized by Brown.

  “Providing funding to military members who have a culture of charging ahead fast and solving the problem as creatively as possible is a great fit,” Muraleetharan said.

  “As a whole, the Air Force can learn from how we're promoting this culture. You're fostering a climate of trust with everyone associated with the project. And if someone has an idea, if it makes sense, let's try it out. That’s the true spirit of innovation. Trust your people and foster an attitude of getting things done. We want to learn together, and we have a mission to solve but it's okay if we fail on the way. We need to work hard; we need to work fast; and as a team, we need to work together to make sure it makes sense. Let's try it out.”

  The makeup of the team matters, according to Muraleetharan, a wide variety of background leads to a wide variety of ideas for problem solving

  “Diversity is at the forefront of involving people who are ready to think differently, implement differently and challenge the system as quickly as possible. Then we can get to a faster and more lethal Air Force and we can get technology to the people.”

  “The Air Force has found a way to hire and maintain the brightest talents that this nation has to offer,” he added. “Everyone has an amazing story. Everyone is looking out for the mission and for the people. I appreciate the awesome climate at work every day.”

  The uniqueness of the climate, the mission and opportunities, like the Edison Grant, are never lost on Muraleetharan.

  “As uniformed members of the Air Force, and as scientists and engineers, we get to develop, test and field awesome technology that the Air Force provides for the Department of Defense and for the United States,” he said. “One of the only ways you really get to do this is by being part of the Air Force team directly.”