RFI & Beyond

Requests For Information (RFIs) are often used to gain intel from suppliers in relation to the feasibility and budget requirements of upcoming potential projects.  It can be more efficient and cost effective to let the suppliers do all of the hard work rather than tasking internal staff.  An RFI from some space administration came across my desk the other day.  I was about to put it straight into the innovation bin when the word, "challenge" caught my eye.  It appears this space administration is creating some sort of space competition.  This is the exact type of situation we would participate in under normal circumstances.  This particular administration has a hidden agenda because they want our ideas without paying us for them.  I can’t endorse that type of revenue stream.

Clever companies who have trouble innovating from within have long used RFIs as an innovation trap since suppliers voluntarily disseminate action plans in order to secure the winning bid on a project.  It is much harder to get suppliers to supply data if one were to write, “It is your duty to prop up our administration.  We need your best ideas to use for our own projects.  We will take your ideas, deny we got them from you, and use them for our benefit.”  That doesn’t sound enticing, does it?  AcMo doesn't resort to RFI pilfering to fuel our innovation labs in the manner some other organizations do.  If this were the old days, we would have put a reference to the most egregious violator right into the text since we have so much trouble figuring out how to Put It On Wax.

We are so far ahead of them on the innovation and execution fronts that they are scrambling to maintain their perceived relevance in the space business.  This particular RFI also has a throwaway clause that states, "...to understand the applicability of the technology developed by the competition for other non-government applications.  This always means super secret and super cool military weapons, like the non-lethal glue gun.  WE know the game and we're not playing, but we would win if we did play.

This chart holds all of the designs we need to borrow from to make our ship work.    

AcMo is going to space with our own borrowed ideas used to build our own ship using our own suppliers’ capabilities.  To keep the project confidential we have minimized the use of outside suppliers.   Having said that, we may send out an RFI in the near future looking for groups who have experience building hyper drive thrusters in zero gravity environments while being attacked by unidentified enemy forces.  We understand the available pool of applicants is limited, but we are confident we can find the innovative ideas we need from the right RFI.  That will also give us an opportunity to determine how far along the development process some of our competitors are because we all use the same suppliers.

The most important detail that we must resolve before we can embark on this journey is an advertising one.  We need to figure out a way for our ship to project the AcMo name large enough so that every person on Earth who has working eyes can see our ship as it flies past in orbit.  We are talking about creating the world’s largest ever-seen flying ad.

Your ad could be here in a much smaller font than ours.