EarlyBirds and The Australian Department of Defence To Discuss Actionable Innovation At MilCIS

The Australian Department of Defence’s Force Exploration Branch recently undertook a pilot program with the Australian open innovation ecosystem platform company EarlyBirds. The goal of the program was to leverage EarlyBirds’s disruptive innovation platform to ask the question - "How do we achieve concept-led Force Design by advancing capability edge based on industry actionable innovation?"

The two participants of the program are now scheduled to deliver a brief at the Military Communications and Information Systems Conference and Expo (MilCIS) to share their progress and learnings. MilCIS is an annual conference that welcomes military and government organisations, academia, and defence industries to contribute to the future direction of military communications and information systems. MilCIS is scheduled from 22 February to 24 February 2022 at the National Convention Centre in Canberra, Australia.

According to communication from EarlyBirds co-founder and CEO Kris Poria, “The brief will provide details on the pilot program around cybersecurity capability edge based on industry actionable innovation. The pilot program explored a specific framework to showcase and build dynamic global industry capabilities in cybersecurity. The brief will also showcase what has been done, discuss potential use cases, outline how different stakeholders could use these dynamic capabilities going forward, and how this could be applied in other technologies areas as well as how this approach could change the way the Australian Department of Defence could accelerate its innovation journey.”

During the briefing, Kris Poria will be joined by Jeff Penrose, co-founder and COO of EarlyBirds, Commodore Michael Turner, Director-General, Force Exploration Branch, Force Design Division, Department of Defence, and Colonel Greg Daly, Director, Futures & Concepts, Force Exploration Branch, Force Design Division, Department of Defence.

On the success of the pilot, Commodore Turner said, “The pilot demonstrated that Joint Concepts could not only provide ideas for future Defence Force Design, but provide insights into the technological feasibility of these ideas by pairing with EarlyBirds to develop industry innovation maps linked to the underlying concept, in this case, the Joint Cyber Concept.”

Jeff Penrose talks about the significance of the pilot program run in partnership with the Department of Defence by saying, “We released our Cybersecurity Innovation Map back in August 2021. As a part of the project, we broke down the complicated world of cybersecurity into easy-to-follow core cyber themes and subthemes, offering stakeholders and decision-makers such as Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) a dynamic view of the entire global cyber industry. Our goals behind releasing the map were to provide a comprehensive view of current global cybersecurity innovation capabilities and spark conversation on how these innovations could benefit the way several different public and private organisations are presently operating. The collaboration with the Department of Defence is one of the many ways that the real-world applications of these innovations are being brought to life, in this case, to bolster the strength and sovereignty of an entire nation. We are proud to finally showcase our findings from the collaboration on Thursday, 24 February, at MilCIS. We hope you are able to join us for the presentation and be a part of the conversation to put the exciting developments in cybersecurity to work for your specific industry use case.”

Readers can contact MilCIS at the phone number +61 2 6252 1200 or at the email address milcis@consec.com.au for more details about this briefing and other details such as registering for the event, sponsorships, and exhibition proposals.

EarlyBirds offers an open innovation ecosystem with its unique global platform of over 4 million startup, scaleup and mature innovators plus subject matter expert assisted programs Explorer and Challenger. The AI enabled platform has advanced search, discovery, and filtering capabilities along with functionality to undertake Innovation projects and to create personal or organisational innovation pipelines. Innovation Maps are dynamic and updated daily as new technologies emerge.

The Explorer and Challenger programs can be delivered by EarlyBirds SMEs or they offer training to organisation wanting to conduct their own programs. The Explorer program is ideal for businesses that need innovation as a service to supplement existing innovation programs or to conduct innovation projects as required. The Challenger program is designed to solve one business or technical challenge at a time and search for relevant innovators that meet the business, technical, commercial, and business risk requirements.

Readers can find out more about EarlyBirds by heading over to its website at earlybirds.io.