When working with defence and space an innovative mindset is a must. But new opportunities equal uncertainty. Trying to solve a classified problem involves enormous risks in the innovative process.
Managing strategic and radical innovation requires a different skill set to new product developments based on incremental improvements as Professor Jacob Brix of Aalborg University Business School, Denmark, discusses in this pair of podcasts for Terma, an engineering and technology company operating in the aerospace, defence, and security sectors.
Jacob describes innovation as a process: “You find opportunities, elaborate them, test them, make them work, and get adoption. Innovation is a continuous process, looking for new opportunities both in the market and technologically to find the next invention worth pursuing.”
Jacob is the Co-chair of the Strategic / Radical Innovation Management track at the 2022 R&D Management Conference.
Terma Innovation Podcast
Terma is a Danish company providing pioneering technologies and engineering solutions for the aerospace, defence and security sector. It was founded over 70 years ago by the brothers Orla and Svend Aage Jørgensen as a small mechanical shop manufacturing gas cylinders and autoclaves as well as thermometers and manometers – inspiring the name Terma.
Now the company provides high-end niche products, technologies, and capabilities. Over recent years projects have included: the Ørsted satellite that measured the earth’s magnetic field in 1999, Huygens probe that landed on Titan in 2005 and the European satellite navigation system Galileo, which was launched in 2011.
It heads up the industrial consortium behind Denmark’s largest space project ASIM – The Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor – which was launched successfully in 2018 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Terma also leads the technical part of the project.
In the podcast, Annette Skyt, the Innovations Specialist at Terma, discusses radical innovation with Jacob Brix, Professor of Innovation and Management at Aalborg University.
Episode 1 covers the importance of innovation, what makes it hard, and why it is what makes Terma and other organizations continuously relevant.
Episode 2 continues the discussion, focusing on how to facilitate innovation-practices as a tech company and covers the important question “how do you make specialized experts work together to create innovative solutions that works in real life?”
