#CalianAt40: Innovation and technology driving us forward

As we celebrate Calian turning 40 this year, I’ve enjoyed sharing more about our history, our purpose, and what’s behind the work we do. This four-part series — #CalianAt40 — initially kicked off with #CalianAt40: Living our core purpose and last month I shared the second article: #CalianAt40: Teamwork behind our success. In those articles, you learned about where we started, our history and core purpose. Today, I’m excited to reveal more about where we’re headed: the innovation and technology driving us forward.?

Many of you know Calian as primarily a service-based business – we train the military, treat patients in healthcare settings, and prevent cyber attacks on our customers’ virtual infrastructure. However, in addition to maintaining those services, an emerging part of our business involves engineering innovative, creative products and solutions for our customers’ complex challenges, leveraging the experience of our advanced technologies business which has been designing and implementing innovative solutions for more than 50 years. I believe this is incredibly important, to keep innovating, ?and ensuring that we remain a leader in all that that we do.

The very essence of innovation — the ability to take good ideas and apply them to real world challenges and opportunities — actually exists as part of our core purpose. Calian helps people communicate, innovate, learn, stay safe and lead healthy lives — today and tomorrow. And with this in mind, I see innovation as woven into our fabric. Together with technology, it’s also what will help us continue to live our purpose and ultimately, help more people.??

Innovation that addresses real world problems?

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Ideas are great. However, my definition of innovation intentionally includes tackling ‘real world’ challenges and opportunities because linking the two gives innovation a driving force. In a way, the two are inextricably linked. To explain, I turn to the famous proverb: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Creativity fuels innovation much more effectively in times of greater need than when you’re developing ideas for ideas-sake. Innovation doesn't have to be major, either. A minor innovation is as important as long as it’s contributing to solving a real problem.??

To paint a picture, here are some examples of how we’ve used innovation at Calian to solve our customers’ real world challenges:??

Security against an increasing amount of cyber attacks and threats?

Never has cyber security been more relevant – it’s an integral tool for businesses to stay secure amongst growing complexity and increased cyber attacks. With our security operations centres, our IT & Cyber Solutions team has the ability to manage cyber infrastructure services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We look at each organization as a whole — including their data centre, networks, end-points and employees — to create a robust cybersecurity plan. This helps our customers sleep well at night knowing that we're committed to investing in our cyber platforms to keep them safe.?

Improving access to healthcare with remote patient monitoring??

Going back to our core purpose, part of which is to help people keep leading healthy lives, our health business is gearing up to extend our solutions beyond supporting healthcare delivery and clinical research. Soon, we’ll be incorporating remote patient monitoring into our solutions — improving access to care and decreasing healthcare delivery costs.??

Training the military with realistic scenarios using immersive learning??

When it comes to military training, the more realistic the training experience, the better. In our learning business, we use virtual reality and Microsoft lens technology to place trainees inside the scenario, giving them an experience second only to performing the actual task. I’m extremely proud we are using this new and sophisticated technology for such an important application – training the members of our military so they're better prepared to defend us at home and abroad.??

New software – responding to customer needs?

Recently, our Advanced Technologies team introduced the Illuminator, a powerful software add-on to our popular Decimator spectrum analyzer product designed to monitor radio frequency communications and detect signal issues. While Decimator has been a mainstay of satellite communications monitoring for over a decade, the Illuminator software is a great – and innovative – addition to that line. Innovation is one of our core strengths at Calian, and we will continue to listen to our customers in order to provide exciting new products.??

Fostering an innovative mindset??

As you can see, innovation and technology is not only leading us to solutions to complex issues: it’s driving us forward, upgrading existing products to handle the demands of today.??

In many ways, this cycle is in motion at Calian. For one, we’ve created an Innovation Playbook which documents how we want to bring ideas through to the product. We've recently had our first idea contest where we asked the Calian team for ideas around topics like, ‘How do we work more efficiently?’ and we set reward milestones which demonstrate how much we value great ideas.??

Earlier this year, we also established an Innovation Council that meets regularly to provide a pan-Calian innovation mechanism for inspiring idea creation, a forum for employees engaged in the innovation agenda and discussion around ensuring we have collaboration-oriented platforms, processes, principles and practices across the business.??

We’re not just talking about innovation but recognizing that we need to put the mechanisms in place to harvest, develop, reward, and field it. When it comes to innovation, I like to say: ‘Let's not hope it happens. Let's make a plan to make it happen.’??

Stability through diversity, growth through innovation?

Taking a bird’s eye view at our progression through our four business segments — Calian Advanced Technologies , Calian Health , Learning, and Calian IT & Cyber Solutions —? I see how diversifying our business has not only provided us a stable foundation, but has perfectly complemented our innovative mindset. New technologies and creative solutions are what our customers need to keep doing what they do best. As we continue to scale, it allows us to bring more to our customers and technology will be a key enabler to that.?

We’re serious about innovation because our customers trust us when they can’t fail. I’m beyond proud to share some of the examples of how we’re doing this in the real world and walking the walk when it comes to how we define innovation. Good ideas applied to real problems.??

***Please share a comment below: How do you define innovation???