Gaule: Give a brief description of the purpose of your venture, when it was formed and how the process occurs in your organisation. Adcock: The vision of our business is “to transform the way the world delivers training”, primarily in the military market but also in selected hazardous civilian markets such as mining. We do this by the progressive use of gaming technologies integrated with higher-fidelity military components as required. We describe ourselves as technology agnostic and promote the use of open systems, which is itself novel in the defence market. We operate a number of high-profile training facilities in the UK, and most of our work is enabled by a long-standing transformational research programme that scientifically explores if and how emerging commercial technologies can be effectively utilised in training. We created this business two years ago, by bringing together com- plementary components from across the QinetiQ group. QinetiQ uses a “core, explore and test for value” model to focus its businesses and investments. Around 90% of the company is core – well established, major businesses that represent the resilient heart of what we do. Explore busi- ness units, of which this is one, are small businesses that have the potential to grow rapidly, thus becoming core in the future. As such, explore businesses are given the sup- port and investment to succeed, although of course this is closely monitored against business plans. Test for value represents individual and specific ideas or technologies which are tightly and efficiently managed through a series of stages to determine if and how they should be taken forward. A small proportion of these will then develop into explore business. Gaule: How is this venture different from other businesses in the group? Adcock: Our training and simulation business has trans- formation as a core element of the value proposition. We are doing everything we can to support the customer com- munities’ evolution into a different way of doing things. This comes with risk, the kind of risk that it would probably not be sensible to take with a core business unit. However, this clarity and commitment to a transformation agenda is then what defines everything we strive to do. This creates a self- reinforcing culture over time – if we can be transformational in our environment, in how we behave, in how we present, and in how we construct and deliver our services, then it becomes central to who we are, enabling us to be genu- ine about the transformation agenda for our customers. Clearly this is a…

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