What can startups in the new space industry do to rise above the status quo and win the new space race? How can they overcome technical and value chain complexity to meet project deadlines, costs, quality, performance, and reliability by operationalizing collaboration?
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes (registration required).
Table of Contents
- Winning the New Space Race
- Defining Success for a Space Startup
- Winning the New Space Race Demands More
- Make Collaboration a Core Discipline
- Recognize Collaboration Challenges
- Multi-CAD Exacerbates Collaboration Challenges
- Operationalize Collaboration
- Enable Innovation to Launch Space Startups
- Enable Collaboration to Launch Space Startups
- Acknowledgments
Winning the New Space Race
The Business of Space is Hard
Winning the new space race to create a successful space industry startup is an extremely challenging yet rewarding endeavor. Getting equipment to space is a complex technical challenge. But launching a startup in the new space industry faces its own unique challenges.
Launching a successful space startup requires substantial investment in the face of extreme competition. It demands top talent and significant innovation to define, develop, and create a unique offering that fills a niche opportunity in a crowded market. However, it can also be very lucrative for those who effectively develop and launch the right kit and capabilities.
The Product Development Status Quo is Not Enough
Launching a space startup requires world-class product development and planning. To succeed, engineering teams must be innovative and agile internally and within their supply chains. That’s no easy task. Today, over one-half of manufacturers miss project due dates on an average project. About one-half also miss product development budgets.1 This performance is not competitive in the new space race.
It’s Time to Operationalize Collaboration
How can space startups improve innovation and product development processes to beat the odds and secure funding, gain confidence from their stakeholders, deploy their technology, and drive profitable growth? One of the proven keys to drive innovation and product development success is to raise collaboration to the next level by maturing from ad hoc processes to an operationalized, digital approach. Effective and efficient collaboration is crucial in the space industry because getting to space requires multiple disciplines and companies across the value chain to work closely together.
How can new space startups improve collaboration to drive innovation and meet time, cost, quality, performance, and reliability targets? It’s time to learn from best practices and operationalize collaboration.
Operationalize Collaboration
Enable the Collaboration Competency
Collaboration challenges point out why even small startups need to operationalize collaboration. Effectively operationalizing collaboration requires the right processes and technology. For startups the technology must be enough to make multi-domain, multi-company, multi-CAD collaboration an intrinsic part of how the company works.
There are many collaboration tools available to support general business collaboration. Space startups may leverage these, but for design collaboration, they need to work in the context of their real environment – highly complex engineering data spread across various CAD formats.
The collaborative platform must support modern engineering approaches, including model-based design, modular development, and design digital twins. It should also support the intersection of the project, product, and the business. The platform should support a range of use cases, from supporting collaboration tasks and workflows to full project management, and offer capabilities like embedded analytics that allow product developers to manage the results in the design context.
Collaborate in a Complex, Multi-CAD Environment
Space startups looking for a design collaboration platform should recognize the requirement to support configuration management, reuse, design review, and change management across domains and CAD solutions. The solutions must support digital mockups, 3D markups, and design comparisons with a combination of CAD models. It’s important to note that their collaborative environment must be able to work with native and non-native CAD models, simulation, and other engineering tools. For example, it should be able to manage simulation data from various tools, regardless of the software providers.
Collaborate Across the Supply Chain
Collaboration also needs to accommodate the complexity of dynamic supply chains. It should be easy to onboard partners of all types, supporting partners with different trust and collaboration maturity levels. For example, it should allow some partners to work online but enable others to use secure, asynchronous data exchange.
Reduce Collaboration Barriers with the Cloud
Lastly, let’s talk about adoption. The solution must be easy to adopt and add new participants to add value. A cloud-based platform can provide secure, selective collaboration across the business and the supply chain with much lower effort to deploy and quickly include collaborators. As our collaboration research shares, companies that use the cloud for product development are more likely to report that collaboration is “very easy.”
Enable Collaboration to Launch Space Startups
Focus on the Mission
The time to get started is now. Succeeding in the space industry is challenging, demanding both technical and business savvy. Space startups need to be fast, innovative, accurate, and nimble to beat the competition. The current product development status quo is not sufficient.
Enable Innovation
Space startups need the right technology to develop highly complex equipment with a diverse supply chain. They need the right tools for engineering, data, processes, projects, and collaboration to efficiently tap the innovative capabilities of their highly skilled workforce, partners, and supply chain. Ideally, they could adopt a collaborative innovation platform that supports all of these needs in an integrated way, supporting a multi-domain, multi-CAD environment and advanced needs like configuration, modularity, and digital twins.
Enjoy the Results
Space startups can’t afford the status quo. They must operate like the Top Performers in our benchmark research. They must operationalize collaboration throughout their value network to become more innovative and efficient, meeting deadlines and budgets while delivering high quality and reliability.
Having the right collaboration platform allows them to drive world-class collaboration despite complexity. It provides engineers the ability to innovate without fear of mistakes, the confidence to make changes, and the ability to get designs right the first time. The result of their collaboration should be a complete digital thread with data continuity that captures intellectual property and provides traceability for regulators. It should also support the business, getting stakeholders on the same page and keeping them informed so they can secure funding based on confidence in their offer, reliably get their equipment into the market, and launch a profitable business to become a leader in the new space industry.
Operationalize Collaboration
Space startups need to operationalize collaboration and make it a part of their company DNA to secure a competitive advantage. Although space startups may have selected their design tools, they still need to support their collaboration needs by adopting the right collaborative platform. Their solution of choice should securely get the right data to the right person, at the right level of detail, at the right time. It should enable digital mockups, 3D markups, and design comparisons with a combination of CAD models. And it must be able to do this in the complex, multi-CAD environment in which most space startups operate. Lastly, the platform should be easy to adopt and securely add collaborators leveraging cloud technologies.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor Dassault Systèmes.
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