The Atlantic Council, in partnership with NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), held the 4th annual Young Professionals Day (YP Day) in Washington, DC, on March 24. The event featured a full-day, outcome-oriented, strategic design thinking exercise with sixty young professionals representing twenty-four of NATO’s twenty-eight member nations. Delegates collaborated to produce a list of creative solutions to pressing challenges NATO faces, ranging from how to address hybrid warfare and threats on NATO’s southern flank, to how NATO can encourage innovation and deliver on the promises from the 2014 Wales Summit.
The NATO Young Professionals Day Report includes detailed descriptions of the top fifteen recommendations produced by delegates. Delegates’ recommendations included creative and out-of-the box concepts, such as the creation of an “Innovation CEO” position within NATO with substantial powers to experiment with new policies. The group also suggested developing a dramatized HBO style series about the history of NATO to increase public awareness and improve the alliance’s public approval; fostering partnerships with venture capital and the defense industry to develop new technologies and create common standards; and the deployment of an elite, rapid response force in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region that includes personnel from NATO partner countries in the south, to leverage local expertise. Details on these recommendations and more can be found in the full report available online here: