Rear-Amiral J.B. Zwick – Full keynote address

Thank you Philippe for the kind introduction and for the opportunity to speak this august gathering.

As everyone here today knows, we live in the digital age and are undergoing a period of significant, rapid change. Unfortunately, the transformative changes that we are experiencing in our private lives are not yet reflected in our professional lives serving Canada, simply put we have not kept up with the pace of change.

The Chief of Combat Systems Integration office, was created to help address this challenge by leading the integration of emerging technologies to enable Canadian Armed Forces operational success in the 21^st century. To ensure that we remain a relevant and reliable partner with our allies around the world. For us, a key component of operational success is through achieving decision advantage over our adversaries by having the best information possible, at the right time and the right place, to enable commanders at all levels to make the best informed decision possible.

Our office will help position the Canadian Armed Forces to best meet this future capability requirement.

And programs like IDEaS are a critical piece to meet these future capabilities.

To successfully achieve this, innovation plays a key role:

But for us, “Innovation is not just about ideas. Innovation is always tied to the ability to perform, execute and deploy.”

Furthermore, “The Innovation cycle is only complete when a capability is fully fielded and trusted by the user”. That user can be the brigade commander, a pilot, a sailor at sea or a forward deployed SOF operator.

The Canadian Armed Forces almost always deploys within a larger alliance framework. In these scenarios, zero day interoperability across contributing military forces is the objective that all modern militaries are vying to achieve.

So as we innovate, we need to continue to consider this overarching integration requirement and leverage available tools such as common data standards and an open architecture approach within our own design processes so that the end result is designed not just for CAF operations, but also to seamlessly integrate into the broader alliance framework. This approach has the added benefit of making your products more desirable not just to the Canadian Armed Forces, but to a much broader potential market place as well.

I would like to take a few moments to identify three keys areas where we are looking to innovation to play a key role in helping achieve our objectives.

The first area is time.

As I said earlier, in warfare he or she, who makes the best decision the quickest will have the advantage. Or as General MacArthur once famously put it, the synopsis of every military disaster contains the phrase “too late.” Here the integration of multiple diverse data sources, in real time, into a single common operating picture is a clear focus area that all militaries around the world are striving to achieve. We are all looking for innovative approaches and systems to help address this challenge.

The second area is legacy equipment.

Every military around the world has the conundrum of legacy equipment and how to optimize this equipment in an environment of rapid technological advancement. Like all other militaries, the Canadian Armed Forces has billions of dollars of legacy equipment that it will continue to operate into the future. The challenge is how to best use emerging technologies and modern processing capabilities to unlock the trapped value within these systems. Recent work with our own North Warning System has clearly demonstrated the benefits that can be achieved through this kind of approach.

The third area is the user interface.

As I mentioned earlier, one of our challenges is to effectively support a broad range of end users, people, who are operating in a wide range of difficult and dangerous environments. In this area addressing human factors as we look to enhance human machine pairing is of critical importance. Our work to date with other militaries has shown us that having a user configurable interface, instead of a one size fits all solution, is a key factor to achieving success. Here again, innovation has a key role to play.

The three areas I have just mentioned are narrowly focused on achieving operational success, and represent only a small portion of the broader defence and security portfolio that IDEaS supports. So my plea to you is, any assistance this group can provide in addressing our challenges across the entire defence and security portfolio, would be greatly appreciated.

In closing, I would like to congratulate all of the innovators who are here with us today.

I have seen firsthand how monumental an achievement it is to make innovation happen.

It is great to see near to market solutions that IDEaS will deliver that we could potentially make critical parts of our future capability.

The hope is that this technology will also find new pathways to help fill in gaps in defence and security that I have mentioned today; but ultimately they will also help bolster the larger Canadian innovation ecosystem.

Marketplace is a great testament to your collective work.

Enjoy the rest of the day.