First Word
DCAF, Air Commodore Howse
- The Year of Innovation—2010
By Deputy Chief of Air Force, Air Commodore Gavin Howse
2010 is now upon us, so what better time to look forward to the year ahead.
There is no question 2010 will be another busy year for us in the Air Force and the wider New Zealand Defence Force. The Defence Review White Paper will be coming out in the next few months; we’ll be implementing more outcomes from the Defence Transformation Programme; and delivering our Capability upgrades will continue to be a major priority, as will delivering capability today. It’s important that we understand the ways in which these four priorities mesh together, as all four will determine our success.
In addition to this, I believe 2010 must be the Year of Innovation for the Air Force, a year where our innovative side must shine through more than ever before. The tougher financial environment that we (as well as every other business and organisation in New Zealand) now find ourselves in, means that fostering and acting on really great innovative ideas is more important than ever.
The Air Force has done a lot of work to reinvigorate our RNZAF Innovation Scheme in the last few months. The aim of this scheme is to foster the generation of those ideas and, where appropriate, provide the resources needed to put them into action.
There is no such thing as a silly idea. We have incredibly clever, innovative people in the Air Force team who are full of great ideas. Innovation is part of the culture of continuous improvement that we have yet to seriously leverage off, and the new innovation web site is where your ideas will take flight! From the discussions I’ve had with many of you, I know that you are keen to offer suggestions for how we can eliminate waste in the way we conduct our business, and help us to make this organisation an even better place to live and work.
One such innovation at the Ohakea Hydraulic Bay has saved over $1.25 million by designing a test box and manufacturing it in the machine shop. This has produced ongoing savings by doing repairs on Seasprite components in New Zealand, rather than sending them offshore to the United States to have them done. What a great innovation; you can read about this on the new web site.
We have set up some seed funds for worthwhile innovations and you now have a challenge to go forward and look at how we are doing things and how we could do them better. The innovation scheme is not designed to negate good ideas being implemented in each of our units, but what it is designed to do is to capture good ideas that might have utility across the whole Air Force, and the wider NZDF.
Thanks in advance for your great ideas. If anyone can do it better, we can! We’ll keep you updated with how the scheme is going throughout the year. Watch this space!