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On 21 March, Isdefe hosted the 4th Call for its Internal Programme to Gather and Manage R&D Ideas.
This Programme calls on Isdefe staff to get involved by presenting innovative ideas and proposals in order to encourage a corporate culture of R&D and to highlight the entrepreneurial spirit and commitment of the staff in this area.
The maturity of the programme, now in its fourth edition, is evident through the quality of the proposals received, the increased number of collaboration proposals, and the regularity in the number of proposals presented, which accounts for 5% of the staff and every work centre, thus underscoring Isdefe’s commitment to innovation.
All the proposals are channelled into a mechanism that is used to manage the expectations that are created, while the two winning ideas materialise into two internal R&D projects, which this year were “Tokenisation as an asset for polluting emissions in air transport by processing data in near real-time”, by Mr Pedro García Fernández, and “DOCPro – Natural language processing tool for automatic document analysis”, by Mr Jorge Lega de Benito.
The event included a round table on “The Relevance of R&D in the Ministry of Defence and AESA”, led by Division General José Luis Murga Martínez, the Ministry of Defence’s Deputy Director General of Planning, Technology and Innovation, and Mr Alfredo Iglesias Sastre, Chief of the Environmental Unit at the Aircraft Safety Department of Spain’s National Aviation Safety Agency.
Division General José Luis Murga expressed the need to incorporate the techniques described in the winning proposal, “DOCPro – Natural language processing tool for automatic document analysis”, because the purview of the Ministry of Defence spans every area of defence (communications, command and control networks, aerial, land and sea platforms, satellite systems, NBC, etc.), which creates vast amounts of data that has to be gathered and analysed using artificial intelligence techniques.
In the round table, Mr Alfredo Iglesias noted that emissions offsets for airlines pose a new challenge for these companies and that R&D is needed to collect readings in real time, since these offsets, which rely on purchasing rights from other industries, will entail a high cost for the airlines.
Lastly, the presentation on open innovation led by Mr Jorge Barrero Fonticoba, the Managing Director for the COTEC Foundation for Innovation, provided a broad perspective of innovation centred around robust models that can be used to analyse “every change that creates knowledge and generates value”.