PORTFOLIO

Innovation can bring enormous benefits both to our customer and to us: it helps to establish Best Practice, saves time and money by re-using proven technologies and methodologies which in turn reduces risk and development time, and it encourages creative focus on new technologies, technology 'leaps' and, ultimately, pull-through.

Overview
Since 2005, within our Innovation and Research programme, we have successfully built upon our innovative approach typified within the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) initiative. (For more details on this project please see the ATLAS/DII collateral available separately).

Our approach spans a broad spectrum including such areas as re-use of existing solutions, development of unique applications and also adoption of the output from the corporate Patent Program.

The principle of re-use of solutions in a different environment has lead to consideration of appropriate Defence solutions in a civilian context. There are obvious concerns around the sensitivity of some of these solutions but with customer support it has been possible to adapt solutions to be marketable offerings in a variety of non-Defence markets.

Our unique applications also benefit from the application of innovation such as the use of 'IP across satellite' to usage based delivery of solutions.

We have also been able to make innovative use of Open Source technology to facilitate an ability to use web technology to enhance and greatly improve the performance of our geospatial based Command and Control visualisation capability.

One of the key initiatives within the Innovation and Research programme is a focus on the substantial intellect within EDS and to realise the latent innovative abilities of so many of our staff. Innovation is very important to our customers' current and long term needs and we are well placed to meet those needs today and tomorrow.

The focus on our staff's creative potential has lead to a number of in-house developments now being progressed via corporate processes; in particular our Patent Program, to become marketable solutions. These solutions are being looked at within not only the Defence domain but also the wider corporate market.

The process of identifying innovation has been enhanced by close collaboration with the wider corporate initiative. Within this initiative, in October 2004, EDS launched the UK Incubator Programme (now known as iMatters) through which we aim to select as partners SMEs (small and medium enterprises) which offer innovative services or products, have a unique selling proposition, are able to identify known advantages over their competition and can scale their product or service to meet the requirements of EDS' clients. A substantial number of SMEs have registered an interest in the programme.

EDS Defence has successfully augmented the corporate initiative with SME collaborations of its own where its customer requirements are clearly unique.

In addition to tracking and stimulating innovative ideas internally and with selected smaller concerns we are also utilising alliances with partners of more substantial size such as Microsoft, Sun, Motorola, EMC, Oracle and others.

To realise economies of scale and achieve further benefits, the EDS corporate-wide initiative known as Agile, focuses upon re-use of proven corporate solutions.

By forging stronger links with the customer research community we are able to gain a deeper understanding of their requirements and areas of real interest. Our aim is to broaden our capacity to respond and to work with the customer to explore opportunities around his immediate and future needs. We are working with a number of academic centres of excellence in areas which include non-verbal communication and other assistive technologies - applicable when considering the true nature of military personnel in a conflict, and Homeland Security. Other areas where we continue to develop our collaboration include exploitation of Complexity Theory to predict diverse vulnerabilities, robotics and the realisation of an holistic sensor network.

EDS Defence is proactively involved in the leading edge development of Semantic Web and Web 2.0 based capabilities and applied research in response to the universal problems of Information Overload and lack of Information Interoperability. The Semantic Web was originally based on the Resource Description Framework, however, many other equally important protocols and technologies have been added to fully enable a data driven semantically rich environment. EDS is currently developing a composite set of next generation Enterprise Information Management (EIM) Capabilities and Services of which our recent developments around the Semantic, Web 2.0, and SOA will be a fundamental part. A paper on "EDS and the Semantic Web" is available separately.

In November 2006 we held the first two of a series of Innovation events. The first was a broadly based introductory session embracing the core elements of our approach. The audience consisted of customers, partner companies and other collaborators and they heard presentations from 3 leading universities, our 'Agile' partners, smaller concerns with whom we are working and our own innovators. The event was judged to be 'very good' by nearly 90% of attendees. A second event set the style for future events by being focused on a narrower customer area. Events for the coming year will reflect topics of interest as requested by our customers.