Aerospace, transport, defence and energy - four sectors that have seen quantum leaps in technical innovation during the 20th century, but which now find themselves at a crossroads on the cusp of the 21st …

The aerospace and defence industry, an incubator of engineering excellence for the past hundred years, is facing huge challenges as designers look to squeeze fresh performance gains from ‘platforms’ - aircraft, especially - that have changed only incrementally since the arrival of the gas-turbine six decades ago. The transport industry faces similar dilemmas, caught between the need to service burgeoning passenger growth markets and ever-growing curbs on climate-changing carbon emissions. The energy sector, too, must somehow balance the necessity to meet exploding growth in global power demands with the need to markedly reduce rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

At High Frontiers, we are focused on what we see as a succession of tipping points that are set to dramatically impact the world over the next two decades. Set up to quantify these issues on behalf of clients who need objective, hard-hitting analysis - sometimes in areas shunned by the science mainstream - High Frontiers Innovation is dedicated to shedding light on complex scientific, environmental and economic problems through hard data.

Two recent projects illustrate what we mean:

1. In July 2006, in conjunction with Bert Hunter, a director of Mercer Management Consulting, Nick Cook undertook an analysis of the future direction of the UK aerospace industry on behalf of the Farnborough Aerospace Consortium, the aerospace trade body for the South East of England. Among its other important findings, the study demonstrated that:

• The global defence industry is at an ‘inflection point’ characterised by flat budgets, limited current platform life and the potential for emerging, ‘disruptive’ (game-changing) technologies. “In a decade or two,” we reported, “the industry may be unrecognisable from its present form.”
  
  
• Innovation in the aerospace industry is currently vested in the boundary layer between pure engineering and IT
  
  
• In the US, the average age of an aerospace engineer is 56. Recruiting fresh talent is increasingly a problem. The lack of expertise is in danger of strangling the industry as we know it. It may also act as a stimulus in helping to reshape it

For more, visit:
Mercer Management Consulting (Oliver Wyman)
Farnborough Aerospace Consortium

2. We are currently embarking on a bold and exciting project to quantify by objective analysis the present state of so-called ‘zero point energy’ physics. In 2001, Nick Cook’s book, The Hunt For Zero Point, told the story of his ten-year search for radical propulsion and energy technologies that might lift the world into a new, ‘fuelless’ industrial age. The current study will underwrite the findings of the book with hard, incontrovertible data. We are particularly keen to hear from anyone who can demonstrate working hardware of so-called ‘over-unity’ devices.

For further information or to contact us, click here.