Month: October 2008

The MOD Grand Challenge – The importance of customer collaboration

The MOD Grand Challenge presented us with the perfect opportunity to collaborate with customers and stakeholders to achieve winning results. Read more…

“You are a Company or Platoon commander about to undertake an urban operation, which might culminate in contact with enemy forces. As you enter the urban terrain your views along main streets are relatively good, but are figures in the distance hostile or not?

Elsewhere, your line-of-sight is blocked by walls, buildings, shrubbery and all the usual urban clutter, such as power and telephone poles and cables. What waits at the next intersection?

What lies round the corner of the next building or concealed in houses or behind rooftop parapets? Answering those questions will enable you to make sound tactical decisions. But what information can you get that is immediately useful to you and your troops? What can help you determine the threats you face and what your course of action needs to be?

You are aware of a number of potential danger points where the enemy could lay an ambush. Alleyways lie to the side of main road which could conceal your opponents and allow them to move swiftly out of sight. Snipers could wait, concealed on rooftops, behind walls or parapets, or at windows or doorways. A Rocket Propelled Grenade team could be lurking under cover in a shaded suburban garden, ready to strike at a moments notice. Or perhaps an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) lies concealed across your route, waiting to be triggered as you approach”.

Raglan and Vicki Butler-Henderson
Raglan & Vicki Butler-Henderson at the Grand Challenge

Being able to automatically find out these answers was the crux of the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, the aim of which was to:

“Create a system with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, locate and report a comprehensive range of military threats in a hostile urban environment”.

In response to this Mindsheet put blood, sweat and tears into developing a cooperative fleet of miniature autonomous surveillance vehicles.  Named Testudo, each vehicle can follow a pre-assigned mission plan, avoid obstacles and then wirelessly report back detected threats from the hazard zone to a base station.

The MOD Grand Challenge was a great experience and whilst there was fun to be had alongside the hard work and tension of the final, there are very real consequences to the safety of our troops by delivering solutions that work.  So it was a perfect platform for us to apply the Mindsheet market driven approach to the development of our solution.

In our report, “The Innovation Lens“, we examined the need to collaborate with customers and stakeholders to understand their requirements and generate winning concepts.  This early customer collaboration has a further purpose in mitigating the risks associated with market acceptance.  Early customer feedback means “show stoppers” and “blind alleys” are avoided before large development and launch expenditure is incurred. Also critical, is the importance of gaining customer buy-in during the early stages of development when key trade-off decisions are made.

The MOD Grand Challenge presented us with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this.  We involved soldiers in the Mindsheet team with active service experience from Afghanistan; and then we partnered with a traditional military supplier MBDA (who provided the vehicle planning system for Testudo). Furthermore, the MOD, the military and scientists provided valuable guidance throughout each stage of the challenge.

But exposing your solution to the market early on comes with caveats:

– Do protect your intellectual property early on to prevent your ideas being copied.  (See our article Fast ways to protect your IP).

– Do present your concepts in a realistic way through prototypes and market materials so that accurate validation can be performed by the customers.

Mindsheet's Testudo Robot
Mindsheet's Testudo Robot

On the latter point, we brought the Grand Challenge concept alive through rapid build of our prototype model using off the shelf materials where possible. The chassis came from a rugged remote control toy platform with a top speed of 35MPH, (yes we did have lots of fun testing them).  The same off the shelf approach applied to the sensors and communications.  Rather than wasting time or resources re-engineering the chassis, we put our effort into threat detection algorithms and vehicle control behaviours, where the true opportunity for innovation lay.   Check out videos of our robots here.

Our demo and feedback sessions to the stakeholders were further enhanced by the preparation of marketing materials and video footage of the vehicle being used by soldiers to seek out IEDs and bomb threats.

However, nothing could have prepared us for the extremes of weather thrown at us during the final in August 2008. Whilst our vehicles coped admirably with the realities of the environment, others were less fortunate and in some cases had to pull out of the competition due to the wind and rain.

But as Professor Phil Sutton, Director General Science Technology Strategy said: “In reality, in operations you can’t choose the weather so this has been a good test”.

So did our early customer collaboration pay off?  Whilst we weren’t crowned ultimate winner of the event, we did qualify as one of only seven finalists, we successfully detected and located 5 threats within the urban zone, we successfully rejected the civilian decoys and we came up with a solution that perhaps represented the most portable, practical and reliable solution of all the finalists on display. Hence, we are now in discussions with the MOD and our partners to take the concept forward.

Technology Push – Should we dictate to our market?

As a business leader, it is all too easy to get pushed into investing in technologies prior to understanding the market. Or perhaps you’re trying to find a market for a technology that already exists in your organisation but has yet to be exploited. This may seem an obvious and cost effective approach. But beware!

As a business leader, it is all too easy to get pushed into investing in technologies prior to understanding the market. Or perhaps you’re trying to find a market for a technology that already exists in your organisation but has yet to be exploited. This may seem an obvious and cost effective approach. But beware!

Remember the story of NASA developing the elaborate pump action space pen that could write in zero gravity; whereas the Russians used pencils! Well it’s not actually true, but it does illustrate the point. When you find a market for your blockbuster technology – do double check that there isn’t a simpler solution already out there.

In my first job, we made a similar mistake. We had an exotic Optical Correlator technology that could find simple patterns in video feeds. I’ll spare you the gobbly-gook but the implementation was anything but simple.

First the system of lasers, lenses and spatial light modulators had to be mounted on a slab of granite to remove any vibration. Next there was a large box of electronics to drive the system and finally the whole configuration had to be cooled to prevent overheating and to keep the system stable. Although cumbersome, it did work and was very fast at finding edges in video or even patterns such as military tanks which was the intended application.

However, there was a simpler way that used computers to directly perform the same task. In fact nowadays; the same operation can even be performed in Paint Shop Pro on your home computer. Of course, in my R&D lab this is not what we wanted to hear. It was just so much more fun to experiment with the exotic rather than use plain old pencils!

And yet, technology push can work. Just think of the Television, iTunes or the Word Processor. So what made the difference? Well for starters the technology was compelling, in other words:

1. Customers valued the improved performance as a result of the technology
2. There wasn’t a simple alternative way to achieve these same benefits

However, there is more to technology push than just improved performance. Clayton Christensen observed in his book “The Innovators Dilemma”, when the best firms succeeded, they did so because they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers’next-generation needs.

But, paradoxically, when the best firms subsequently failed, it was for the same reasons–they listened responsively to their customers and invested aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing capabilities that satisfied their customers’ next-generation needs.

It is not enough to just improve performance along the already known “vectors of differentiation”. Just because a customer valued an improvement in the past, doesn’t mean that they will value further improvement in that direction. In fact, customers rarely state when things are “good enough”.

Instead, a blockbuster technology should also bring new benefits that the customer never even thought about before. They should irreversibly change the rules of the game. It’s called disruption of the market place.

Often disruptive technologies are not even hard to develop, they maybe just a new configuration of existing proven technologies. For instance, Apple didn’t invent the Internet, compressed music files, MP3 players or download systems. Instead they just put those technologies together in a unique way that has seriously challenged the Music Industries previous distribution business model.

Which leads me to my last point, usually the market disrupter is not one of the existing incumbents in a marketplace. Instead, they are invariably a newcomer with nothing to lose by the destruction of the old order!