Innovation as continuous practice: How Janes develops new ideas and concepts
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Ben Conklin, Head of Innovation and New Products at Janes, on the opensource defence and security intelligence company’s approach to fostering a consistent culture of innovation.
Janes has been on a transformational journey to deliver the most complete military dataset in the world.
Leveraging advanced technology and decades of experience, 20 years ago the company moved entirely online, and five years ago an acquisition by Montagu Private Equity allowed the company to transition from a content-centric to data-centric business focus.
Today, Janes has the most complete foundational military data sets, providing accurate and current data for any military environment or system to the world’s leading intelligence, military and defence industry analysts.
Joining us from Janes is Ben Conklin, Head of Innovation and New Products, to explore the company’s approach to developing new ideas and concepts.
To begin, Ben highlights the types of innovation initiatives Janes has undertaken in recent years.
“When it comes to innovation, there are many different kinds of goals,” says Ben. “I think that we have, as a company, done a great job of transformative innovation. We’ve been working on a lot
of big projects over the last few years, which has involved significant work on our internal tooling.
“What we’re trying to do now is increase the focus on breakthrough and incremental innovation because we want to do more than these big projects – we’re trying new things, encouraging experimentation and learning as we go. A big focus of mine is trying to create more opportunities for new ideas.”
To facilitate this, Janes has taken on an open innovation mindset, as it believes the best ideas come from collaboration.
“From my perspective, the key to this was opening up innovation internally first,” says Ben. “Our goal started with the creation of an idea marketplace within the company, where employees can submit their ideas. These ideas get commented on, voted on and interacted with, and then we run idea showcases for the top ideas. They are then worked on to become proof of
transformational complete
concepts, where they are then market tested and have the potential to go out into production.
“We’ve now opened up this process to some of our partners as well, but we really wanted to start internally because we have some incredible
people within our organisation. Many of our analysts are former military members, so it’s very natural that our own people will understand the needs of our customers very well – they’re deeply knowledgeable in that area, so they’re able to come up with great ideas that can solve our customers’
problems and may be attractive to the marketplace.”
For Ben, it’s instrumental that innovative practice is a constant activity within the company – and not just a one-off flashpoint.
“For me, it’s key for innovation not to be an event, but rather a continuous process,” says Ben. “Using events to drive innovation is fantastic, but it needs to be something that continues beyond that. A lot of people are used to having that one-time flash in the pan that everyone gets excited about, but then nothing actually comes of it.
“What we’re trying to do is have ideas coming in all the time. Our showcases are quarterly, and we have new products going to market continuously. Innovation is just a process, just like any other business procedure. It has to run all the time for the company to succeed.”
According to Ben, having this consistent innovation approach in place can facilitate the development of ideas in the long term, which helps them become viable.
“There’s a lot of reasons why an idea might go from unfeasible to feasible –the timing may be better, the idea may be more developed or the technology may have evolved. Even if you’re told ‘No’ with your idea, you can still move forward with it, and in the long term,
it could be hugely successful. That’s why having the infrastructure in place to allow for continuous innovation is key.”
So, how does Janes select new innovations to develop? As Ben explains, it’s rooted in company-wide collaboration.
“Our process of selecting our top ideas involves a council of people across every department spanning the company,” says Ben. “The teams with ideas that are considered to have the most potential in the market are then given a short period of time to develop a proof of concept – a working example of the idea that helps us validate its feasibility. This
can then be market tested and, if successful, the main product can be built.
“The expectation is that not every idea will become a proof of concept, and not every proof of concept will become a product. There are multiple points where we can turn something down, and then use that as a learning opportunity to understand what we can do differently next time.
“We have quite a few exciting things in our pipeline, specifically oriented around advanced technologies to deliver our products in more interesting ways, as well as new products focused on the needs of our customers.
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“One of the key areas we’re working on is generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). If you think about Janes as a company, we have a vast wealth of in-depth information, but you have to be an expert in military intelligence to use or understand it. By leveraging AI, we can remove some of that barrier and make the information more accessible.
“We’re also doing a lot of work increasing the volume and variety of data that we can collect. We’re working with imagery and social media to take a closer look at the indications and warnings (I&W) to predict the next conflicts and crises. This is all about trying to understand the factors behind conflict, and then watching for these things happening in the world so we know where to apply certain resources.
“For us at Janes and our customers, we care a lot about national security. What we’re looking at is trying to understand the complexity of national security issues around the world –things like military deployments, troop movements and major unrest. Through our innovation projects, we’re able to have a more specific approach to I&W and improve our understanding of key data sets.
“Looking at our innovation projects more generally, the areas that I see as having explosive growth all involve partners. We have great ideas coming from within the company, but we often rely on our key partners to scale these ideas quickly and make them happen. We need expertise and we need
“Esri was our first partnership that allowed us to deliver our data in new ways – they bring our data to life for geospatial workflows”
capabilities. Almost everything we’re doing in terms of innovation has some sort of partnership angle or leverages a new capability offered by a vendor.”
Partner relationships are a new area for Janes, but they are already playing a key role in its operations.
“Partnerships are a relatively new thing for us,” says Ben. “When we were working exclusively as a publisher, we didn’t need partnerships. As soon as we entered the data space, however, we needed partnerships for a wide variety of reasons.
“Right out the gate, we needed partners who could take our data and bring it to life, so a lot of the partners we work with are advanced software companies that take data and bring it into military systems.
“Esri was our first partnership that allowed us to deliver our data in new ways – they bring our data to life for geospatial workflows. This
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“The other area that I think is really impactful is building partnerships with companies that have specialised expertise and capabilities that complement our own – such as our partnership with Ursa Space.
“Ursa Space has incredible capabilities in working with remote sense data
and very advanced kinds of imagery. One example of this is their work with synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), which is a very new and rapidly growing source of satellite imagery. It has incredible collection capabilities, letting you see through clouds and in the dark.
“What Ursa Space has been able to do for us is take their capability to detect changes over time and then marry it with our intelligence to understand the exact type of equipment in an area, the base it's operating at and the
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capabilities that equipment would have, which is something we could never have done on our own.”
Collaboration is key for Janes, and the company is always looking for new ways to involve its employees in the development of new ideas.
“One thing we do differently that I’ve never seen before is our implementation of ‘Innovation Advocates,’” says Ben. “Within the company, we have people volunteer to help people bring their ideas to life, who we call Innovation Advocates. They’re not there to promote their own ideas, but to help others figure out how to make their ideas a reality.
“Nobody knows everything, so these advocates are here to help them with the ideation process, supporting them, connecting them with people and introducing them to new technological capabilities.
“When we opened up the application to let people be advocates, we were overwhelmed by applications, which was amazing. I was wondering if anyone was even going to want to do this extra work, but it turns out that people would love to, because they want to be a part of new and exciting things. If you just let people participate, they’ll do it.”
Learn more about Janes here.
