Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/653616
t teChnology WATCH www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 37 concept prevalent in the hyper-competi- tive and price-sensitive automotive indus- try. Our ITB tracking tools mirror CRM software, while reporting, maps and other features were also inspired by other appli- cations in geomatics, analytics, account- ing, and tech sectors. Isn't it something like over 80 per cent of innovation is "adopt and adapt," with somewhere less than 20 per cent amount- ing to eureka moments? I am confident that the defence sector has a lot to learn and can borrow from other sectors, and vice-versa. Other sectors should be looking to what is coming out of defence for applications in the mainstream environment (think the internet, GPS and many others). Like usual, it didn't take me long at all to come up with various examples where this cross-over is either happening, or really should be happening. QRA, which is a small tech start-up suc- cess story that came out of an initial re- search project at Dalhousie University, got their start with an IRB investment from a major defence contractor. The problem their technology solves however, is uni- versal in launching major manufacturing platforms in any sector. What tends to happen is that a lot of companies build a system, test it and then find out there are design issues, instead of catching those design issues during the design phase before incurring all of those expenditures. This results in huge cost overruns. Think about the cost for larger platforms such as major shipbuilding programs: nav- igation systems, situational awareness and the integration of combat systems. The Boeing Dreamliner for instance spent bil- lions of dollars on testing and fixing design flaws. By leveraging the QRA technology more in the beginning of these major pro- grams, those huge cost overruns would be reduced. Over the past six months, the company has been very active in the automotive sector. As cars are getting more autono- mous (fewer vehicles today are controlled by their drivers – think cruise control and ABS brakes, next step will be adaptive cruise control, keeping you from driving over the yellow lanes), they are needing technologies like QRA more and more. The recent announcement from General Motors of their investment in Lyft to de- velop self-driving cars tells me this is just the beginning. And since the future of the automotive sector really is in self-driving cards, in addition to increased safety stan- dards, the level of systems engineering and technical verifications will inevitably go up dramatically. "It's interesting for us, since the auto-