The top executive at SAIC today pointed to the company’s mission of creating technology solutions to help solve national security problems, and in particular to the role of its “innovation factory” approach to doing so.
Toni Townes-Whitley, SAIC’s chief executive officer, said during an address at the OutFront: Continuous Agility forum hosted by SAIC and MeriTalk in Arlington, Va., that the company “has shown a proven ability over almost 55 years now to tackle the toughest problems of national and global security and to do the complex things for many, many years and to do that with emerging capabilities, whether they be scientific engineering, computer science over the years, they are now with the best tech, open architecture, plug and play capability, and with very diverse individuals.”
“What you’ve been seeing and hearing about today, our solutions that sit within many of our capabilities that are emerging and incubating within an innovation factory,” the CEO said.
“Those innovation factories are these sort of standalone capabilities that we then integrate into all of the services we do in terms of mission support, mission IT, mission engineering,” Townes-Whitley said.
Lauren Knausenberger, the former U.S. Air Force chief information officer who joined SAIC last month as the company’s chief innovation officer, is leading the company’s innovation strategy across its solutions and services portfolio, and the innovation factory effort.
“This is the place where we intersect all the services we do and support the mission,” Townes-Whitley said of the innovation factory approach.
“All the IT we bring, all the engineering … this is where we take it for the advanced look, the innovation look of what’s around the corner,” she said, adding that includes emerging capabilities “whether it be digital, AI, machine learning, cyber, edge computing – all of that gets intersected within our day-to-day mission capability within these factories.”
