Naval Group press release
A three steps open innovation process
Innovation is at the heart of the Naval Group’s Euronaval booth in Ollioules. During this event, Naval Group reveals its customer-centric strategy to offer state-of-the-art technology to its customers.
Naval Group’s open innovation process starts with a listening phase to ensure that the products we offer are responding most efficiently to the needs of the customers. Together with the end-users, Naval Group engineers imagine tomorrow’s missions and the emerging threats facing the navies. During this phase, operational needs are surveyed. Naval Group experts identify how navies want to respond to these threats, their expectations in areas such as on board life conditions, the roles and interactions they want to have with the increasingly complex and “intelligent” systems they are piloting, their needs in terms of training, coaching and supports at sea and on shore.
During the second phase of our approach, experts work together with customers to define the military capabilities that need to be developed. Few examples are the capability for mobility, endurance, resilience, discretion, the ability to communicate, to identify, to understand a complex situation, to decide, to cooperate, to disembark forces or to hit targets.
The third phase of Naval Group Open innovation process consists in associating as widely as possible the best technology developers, SMEs, startups, laboratories and universities. This co-development phase takes place in France but also in Naval Group R&D centers of excellence in Australia and Singapore. The end user remains in the centre of all the process to challenge and warrant the desirability of the solution.
The Concept Lab as a demonstration of the open innovation process
Naval Group Concept Lab illustrate these different stages of Naval Group’s Open Innovation process which guaranties that solutions remain well adapted, efficient and superior over the long run. It demonstrates how how mission management drives the technology.
In the Concept Lab, naval architects designed future warships based on 4 concrete mission scenarios based on the operational requirements expressed by the clients: anti-submarine warfare, anti-air warfare, RESEVAC mission, offshore asset protection.
In each of these scenari, two models are compared: a distributed model involving small naval units which are collaborative and interchangeable and a centralised model involving classic high capacity naval units. The rigorous computation of performance enables the identification of key military capabilities and critical technologies that supports them.
