If you are a small - or even large - enterprise, with a clever innovation or a technical or business challenge all set to go for funding or to market. How do you work out if anyone else has come up with a rival idea or a solution and if so, how far along are they?
Canberra company EarlyBirds has developed what it terms an innovation ecosystem to develop a strategic picture of particular industry capabilities and trends derived from information in the public domain.
For Defence that could be autonomous systems, cyber, space, artificial intelligence or nuclear submarine-related industry capabilities across Australia, or in AUKUS nations, the Quad or even globally.
So, what’s stopping someone doing a Google search or contracting a consultant? Sure, but that’s barely scratching the surface.
EarlyBirds says it is attracting significant interest from Defence in Australia, big companies as well as the US military.
Company Chief Executive Officer and founder Kris Poria, along with Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Jeff Penrose, told ADM at the Indo-Pacific maritime expo in Sydney they recognised the emerging challenge a few years back.
“We saw that challenge in the market that when big organisations like Defence, when they are looking for digital transformation and innovation, they are generally depending on big system integrators or big four consulting companies to tell them what to do,” he said.
Poria said he saw this first hand when a big company declared that an innovative product presented by a small startup was so good, they intended to do it themselves, rather than buy from the small Australian newcomer.
“With EarlyBirds, we look into what’s happening globally in the industry from early-stage companies, startups, as they scale up and mature and look at what capabilities they are building, who is investing in those companies, where the investment is going, what emerging capabilities. We look at that on a global scale,” he said.
“Right now, we are tracking more than five million organisations globally, looking into their capabilities and capacities, the people behind them.
“We map that out and then we look at it from supply chain point of view or specialisation of different areas or different components. We map that out and look at globally at what’s happening in that domain: what is the industrial capability that is being built right now, what could be emerging, what could be something that we should be looking at right way that could be high potential for defence?”
That’s all derived from information available through the internet, referred to as OSINT – open source intelligence - plus commercially available information.
The EarlyBirds ecosystem features various programs.
Poria said as EarlyBirds started working with various customers, they realised that although the clients loved their work, they really didn’t know how to apply it.
“We created two frameworks. One is the Challenger program. Basically they give us a challenge. We find what’s out there, that somebody might have already solved this problem so you can save a lot of time (not) reinventing the wheel. You can focus on invention not reinvention.
“The second program is what we call the Explorer program which is ongoing innovation. The innovation pipeline is where you start building a strategic picture of what’s out there, these are the companies we should be looking at.”