Fellow Airmen,

Your enthusiasm and ingenuity continues to be our Air Force’s number one weapon system! In April of this year we launched the Airmen Powered by Innovation program aimed at turning your ideas into real cost savings for our Air Force. Since coming online API has received and reviewed more than 2,400 ideas and that number continues to climb. Thank you and keep the great ideas flowing.

The secretary of the Air Force, chief of staff of the Air Force and I are committed to continuous process improvement and empowering you with the tools to refine how you submit ideas for review. To that end, we have developed an enhanced API page hosted on the Air Force Portal giving submitters a wealth of information from the latest API approval stats, to tools that can help refine and enhance potential submissions — making it even easier for you to communicate your ideas about how to improve the way we do business across our Air Force. 

For example, on the enhanced API page you will find nine “hot buttons or icons” allowing you to query previously submitted API ideas (search to see if an idea has been submitted already), see what ideas have been approved, submit your idea, and most importantly check the status of your submission. We also included an expanded database of ideas submitted under the previous Every Dollar Counts campaign to ensure we captured every submission. For our senior leaders, we included icons showing statistics by major command and Headquarters Air Force 2-letter staff along with an executive view icon that includes a monthly API update briefing. 

We are also committed to transparency and having an open dialogue. On the API page you will find monthly reports showing just how we are doing across the Air Force with regards to processing your submissions. There is also a link enabling you to communicate directly with the API Team to get answers to questions you may have. We are also looking at ways to deliver monetary awards quicker — we know your time is valuable and we appreciate your participation.

Finally, I want to challenge each of you to continue to think of ways we can make the world’s best Air Force even better. In the near future I will be visiting many of you “virtually” across the Air Force to talk about API. I want to hear about your experiences and your thoughts on the new look and functionality of the API page. 

Remember the future of our Air Force starts with each of us … and I am convinced we will continue to do what we have been doing best for 67 years — leading from the front with innovation. Fly, fight and win!