Aerospace and beyond
By: Gabriela Matic
Tags: Ati Boeing Accelerator, Startup, Technology, Aerospace, Investing

Dae Ho from Gravity Sketch team said: “We see similarities between the Automotive and Aerospace industries in terms of the need to get different stakeholders on the same page for design reviews… These different teams need to communicate and understand each other’s requirements and perspectives quickly, and be able to walk away from review meetings with the same understanding of what has been agreed.”

Kraken followed: “There are two types of corporate innovation IMHO, being seen to innovate or actually innovating. You need make sure you are getting your needs from the latter. Often the people you most want to deal with are the ones that are the hardest to get a meeting with, usually because they are very good at what they do and everyone wants a slice of their diary.”

In terms of similar challenges, Kraken said: “Startups working with any big enterprise client, whether it’s Oil & Gas or Aerospace, can sometimes be a little like the elephant and the mouse. The corporate elephant could stomp on your startup mouse without even thinking about it — but they can also be quite scared of you because;

“Startups usually fail every single corporate risk metric that enterprise companies have

“Startups are disruptive, either in what they do or how they work (often both)

“Startups don’t think the same way, they will also always try and solve problems in the easiest way possible because they have extremely limited resources

“Most big companies want (rightly) to minimise risk, whereas startups want to maximise opportunity. If founders didn’t already have an appetite for risk they wouldn’t have started a company.

“From the mouse’s perspective, elephants have long sales cycles, internal systems & processes and multiple stakeholders to navigate before finding a decision maker can lead you to getting stomped on.”

Yue Jin from Circulor added: “All organisations, regardless of sector, are coming under increasing pressure to assess the potential for harmful social or environmental impacts in their supply chains and proactively take appropriate measures to prevent or remediate such impacts. Companies that fail to take appropriate steps can expect to be held to account by customers, investors and campaigners.”

What are the biggest differences between aerospace and other sectors?

Septillion noted: “Not many other industries are so newsworthy. It’s not just crashes and incidents that instantly make the news; even queues/delays are televised.”

Gravity Sketch have seen a few differentiators across automotive and aerospace: “The biggest difference between automotive and aerospace we have observed is the degree of freedom in design, and the decision making timelines.

“The aerospace industry has a high degree of engineering constraints which are needed to balance factors such as weight and fuel efficiency, safety and system redundancy. As such, the degree of freedom in design can be at times quite limited — especially for the exterior of the aircraft or for critical components. This is less so for the interior of the aircraft which often can undergo a degree of customisation according to customer needs. In addition, due to the need to control the safety and reliability of the supply chain, the decision making timelines in the aerospace industry can be long, up to 3 years to incorporate a new supplier.

“In the automotive industry, where a large part of a customer’s decision to purchase a vehicle is based on emotion and the aesthetics of the car, there is more freedom in the design of the vehicle. In addition, due to the frequency of new vehicle launches, the decision making timelines can be faster.”

Circulor, with learnings from their provenance tracking for supply chains in automative, added: “The regulatory requirements for organisations to report on the provenance of their materials is different from sector to sector.

“In aerospace, there is significantly more focus on safety and technical integrity as well as the service and maintenance aspects during the whole lifecycle of the product.

“The aerospace sector is primarily concerned with decarbonisation, so understanding the CO2 footprint of the entire production supply chain is paramount; material traceability is a secondary priority. The automotive sector, for example, is the other way around — raw material traceability is the main goal, with dynamic carbon attribution being an add-on service.”