How covert innovation can work in practice

A study on the Manhattan Project – the development of the atomic bomb – shows how organizations can develop advanced technologies despite strict confidentiality. A recently published research paper presents a model that describes how knowledge can be both created and protected throughout the innovation process.

The model shows that privacy is not a static decision but something that needs to be adapted at each stage of development. Several recurring challenges are identified.

What should be protected and who should know?

In the early stages, there is uncertainty about which insights are valuable enough to be kept secret. As the project grows, more skills are required, creating boundaries between the ‘in-group’ – people who have full or almost full insight into the core technological issues of the project – and the ‘out-group’, i.e. those who do not have access to the core secret but still need to contribute work necessary for the innovation to develop and scale up.

Then the confidentiality and access levels are formalized. This is managed by communicating that confidentiality exists and why it is important, without revealing core knowledge.

In later phases, there is a large group of people who cannot have full transparency. The study shows that projects can work anyway, if they are given the technical background or context that makes them capable of performing their tasks without the content that needs to be protected being revealed to them.

A key contribution of the study is that confidentiality must not be reduced to silence. Effective knowledge protection requires controlled information sharing – adaptive disclosures – that allow work to be coordinated, new actors to be included and the pace to be maintained without compromising security.

The dynamics of privacy are changing

The model also shows how uncertainty shifts: from determining what is sensitive, to determining limits on access to information, to assessing how secrecy affects performance. By understanding these shifts, leaders can better plan, scale up and govern covert innovation.

For today’s organizations working with sensitive or strategically important technologies, the study provides a concrete and useful framework: privacy should be seen as a fluid system that evolves with the project, not as a fixed set of rules. When protection and controlled transparency are properly balanced, even highly classified projects can be run effectively.

More about the article and the author
The article Adaptive Secrecy in the Making of the Atomic Bomb: Toward a Process View of Secretive Innovation is published in the scientific journal Organization Science. The author is Rohin Borpujari at the UCL School of Management, University College London, England.