Innovation Talks

Tim Sharp is the Director of Aerospace and Defence in Western Europe for Sopheon. He is a driven Sales Professional with a passion for understanding and diagnosing customer business needs, and articulating solutions that deliver excellent long-term revenue growth and profitability. He has extensive European, Middle East, and Africa experience shaping sales campaigns and has previously worked with InterlocutorGB, Fujitsu, Boeing, Miro, and Futura. Tim was also a Military Helicopter Pilot and Staff Officer for twenty-seven years and a Lieutenant Colonel at the UK Joint Doctrine and Concepts Center, where he ran the analytical program that looked at the trends and drivers that would shape security and defense fifteen to thirty years into the future. Tim holds an Association of Project Management certification from Civil Service College and attended the NATO Defense College in Rome.

Tim joins me today to share the unique challenges of innovation in the aerospace and defense industry. He shares how companies use innovation in technology to help security forces gain an advantage over an adversary and gain a competitive advantage in open government tenders. Tim highlights the risks of escalating costs because of requirement changes on projects that can take years to complete. We discuss the expense of productizing technology and the revenue and profit opportunities that exist in product bolt-ons, upgrades, and commercial adoption. Tim reveals the future implications for defense in managing food, water aid, and people moving across borders in response to climate change. Tim also shares the latest innovation challenges for commercial and military applications such as emissions and the green agenda, COVID passports, aircraft filtration, and collision avoidance.

“Timing and speed is always a challenge.” - Tim Sharp

This week on Innovation Talks:

• How Tim got involved in product development and innovation after leaving the military
• Tim’s work with NATO
• The strategic thinking, speed, and timing challenges of innovation for defense and aerospace companies working on long projects
• Working at the cutting edge of technology
• The balance between creating new-to-market products and making additions and improvements to existing platforms
• Government choices for spending on post-COVID recovery or defense and security
• The bridge and commercial crossover of defense technologies, such as cyberspace security
• How climate and planet change may affect the way defense and security works in the future
• The importance of having the right data at decision-making moments and collaborating data sources

Resources Mentioned:

• Book: Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose
• Book: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Connect with Tim Sharp:

• Sopheon
• Tim Sharp on LinkedIn

This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

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For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon’s newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com and click here.

Reading annual reports carefully is an excellent strategy for knowing where you are going. They can give a good impression of what a company is thinking. With the significant disruption caused by the global pandemic, we can look to these annual reviews to discover clues into what we can expect to see [...]

The post Reviewing Annual Reports appeared first on Sopheon.

Reading annual reports carefully is an excellent strategy for knowing where you are going. They can give a good impression of what a company is thinking. With the significant disruption caused by the global pandemic, we can look to these annual reviews to discover clues into what we can expect to see over the next one or two years. These expectations include the critical role of partners and rapidly expanding ecosystems, trends in collaboration, cybercrime, sustainability, and privacy.

In today’s episode, and review two annual reports, one from IBM and the other from Microsoft, and highlight the key takeaways. I reveal how IBM focuses its attention on deploying AI at scale and delivering complex hybrid cloud solutions that are open, flexible, and secure. I share how Microsoft believes that the rapid advance in distributed computing, ambient intelligence, multi-sense, and multi-device experiences create an era of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. I explore the differences between Microsoft and IBM’s strategies and technologies. I also discuss the changing nature of productivity and Microsoft’s future work from three vectors: collaboration systems, workflow learning, and employee wellbeing.

“Business models are shifting as a result of the digital opportunities.” - Paul Heller

This week on Innovation Talks:

• The acceleration of digital transformation including hybrid cloud and AI solutions and new business models based on the adoption of digital technologies
• How AI is driving IBM’s growth and revenue growth from hybrid cloud services
• Why IBM is focusing on industry clouds like financial services and telecommunications
• How Microsoft believes we are living in the era of an intelligent cloud and how they will focus on helping companies build their tech intensity
• The differences between IBM and Microsoft’s cloud and AI technology and strategies
• Microsoft’s Power Platform, the five hundred million apps to be curated by 2023, and the low/no-code tools that will support Citizen Developers
• The opportunities available from analyzing the 73% of unanalyzed data in the world
• The rising annual costs of cybercrime

Resources Mentioned:

• IBM Annual Report
• Microsoft Annual Report

This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | GooglePlay | Stitcher | Spotify | iHeart

Be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes on social media to help us reach more listeners, like you.

For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon’s newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com and click here.

Colin Tattersall is the Product Manager at Sopheon. He has a strong background initially working in a research capacity in linguistics and knowledge management, eventually moving into new product development and innovation. He was previously an Associate Professor at Open Universiteit Nederlands, a Consultant at QNH Consulting, and a Project Leader at KPN Research. Colin has a Bachelor’s degree in Computational Science and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Linguistics and Knowledge-Based Systems from the University of Leeds.

Colin joins me today to discuss IoT-based innovation management. He explores how we might make use of the insights we get from smart product data in the innovation process itself. He shares how closed-loop product lifecycle management should be informed at the front end by what’s really happening with products. He shares his views on device cooperation and the industrial and product development opportunities that are available from IoT data. We discuss how far it is appropriate to go in using customer data. Colin also shares details on how Accolade is being developed for use in smart products and highlights the challenges of retaining oversight when many tools and techniques are being used.

“Smart products offer the possibility of getting some insight into what really is being used, which feature is getting used all day every day, and which is not hitting the mark.” - Colin Tattersall

This week on Innovation Talks:

• Why machine learning and knowledge management systems are taking off
• How Electrolux have leveraged Accolade Innovation Management Software in their success story, compressing product time to market
• The key challenges and opportunities around innovation
• Getting data from smart products and putting it back into the innovation process for the next generation
• The types of insights that closed-loop product lifecycle management systems provide
• Learning trends in how networks of products are used and working together
• The difficulties in protecting and regulating customer’s data and data sharing

Connect with Colin Tattersall:

• Colin Tattersall on LinkedIn

This Podcast is brought to you by Sopheon

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of Innovation Talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts | TuneIn | GooglePlay | Stitcher | Spotify | iHeart

Be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes on social media to help us reach more listeners, like you.

For additional information around new product development or corporate innovation, sign up for Sopheon’s newsletter where we share news and industry best practices monthly! The fastest way to do this is to go to sopheon.com and click here.