SERVICES

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT & EXPERIMENTATION

EXPLORING POSSIBILITIES
WHEN FUTURE IS UNSURE,
EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Development activities play a major role in ensuring that organisations evolve and adapt to meet future mission requirements. Due to the evolving complexity of the operating environment with a continuous increase in the number of actors and a high rate of technological evolution, the development decisions are inherently complex. It complicates the identification of issues and therefore the identification of the best direction to orientate the necessary development. Concept Development & Experimentation plays an essential role in ensuring the right orientation of the development activity and in reducing the risks associated with the development of new capabilities. FutureGroup is the only company in the region, to provide Concept Development and Experimentation consultancy, to help our clients gain insights into their future problems and to generate game-changing solutions to those identified challenges. In FutureGroup, our Concept Development & Experimentation consultancy helps clients to:  

  • Reduce uncertainty in preparing for emerging threats. Through our Concept Development and Experimentation approach, we help clients to develop a feel for those operations that might succeed in such a threat environment for the force-mix and systems requirements needed to support such operations.
  • Determine the proper mix of emerging and legacy systems. Our vigorous and rigorous program of Concept Development and Experimentation helps our clients in determining those new systems and capabilities that will be required, those existing (or legacy) systems and capabilities that should be sustained, and what kind of mix should be established between them.
  • Generate successes that sustain momentum for innovation. Our experimentation approach involving actual personnel in the operational environment is arguably unsurpassed in their ability to generate support and even enthusiasm for innovation.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

A concept is defined as a notion or statement of an idea, expressing how something might be done or accomplished, that may lead to an accepted procedure. More precisely, a concept describes the method (ways) for employing new capabilities (means) to accomplish given missions (ends). In FutureGroup, our Concept Development process helps clients to describe the future operating environment and the threat that the organisation will face. We help to identify and categorise the required capabilities to meet future missions and to assess the direction in which the required capabilities will be designed and employed. In FutureGroup, we guide our clients in developing game-changing concepts that are:

  • Realistic. The concept must be based on realistic and achievable targets, considering existing technology and available resources such as human, finance and time.
  • Precise. The concept must be precise to be conveyed and understood by the developmental community of the organisation.
  • Fruitful. The new concept should enable to draw meaningful conclusions and have important insights with regards to development objectives. In particular, it should be balanced by considering any possible trade-off – a specific development direction which necessarily entails moving away from other development directions.
  • Simplicity. The concept should be as simple as possible. Simplicity often accompanies the systematic power of concepts and aids in their ease of application and avoidance of errors in their application.

Experimental confirmation of a predication is merely a Measurement,
An Experiment disproving a prediction is a Discovery

EXPERIMENTATION

Experimentation is essentially learning through explicit trials. Experimentation is the only possible mechanism to firmly answer specific questions (or hypotheses). The way humans perceive and understand their surrounding environment is limited to an over-simplified picture and often alternative theories can be proposed to explain observed phenomena. In many situations, experiments are necessary to select the most adequate theory. In FutureGroup, we provide experimentation design, conduct of experiments using a wide range of modelling and simulation systems and field experiments, develop data collection plans and conduct measurement and analyses to provide insights. We conduct three types of experiments:

  • Discovery experiment. Experiments that aim to explore the potential benefits of new methods (concepts) and of its underlying aspects and dependency on external factors.
  • Hypothesis testing experiment. Experiments that aim to advance knowledge by seeking to falsify or confirm specific hypotheses as well as investigating the limitation of those hypotheses.
  • Demonstration experiment. Experiments that aim to display the benefits of novel technologies, organisation structure or concepts of operation.

In FutureGroup, our experimentation consultancy helps clients to achieve the following benefits:

  • Reduced uncertainty (risk mitigation) with regards to the employment of new concepts (Technology and methodology)
  • Objective evaluation of innovations
  • Identification and possibly solution of practical problems that cannot be determined through studies and analysis alone (validation of suggested issues)
  • Provision of empirical evidence to inform doctrine, policy, budgetary and procurement decisions (ie. supporting evidence-based decision)
  • Support to force integration by enforcing the testing of new concepts and methodologies within a joint and/or coalition environment

Contact us to find out how we can help in your transformation journey.