TEDx Leicester | Space Entrepreneurship
Back in July 2017, I received an email asking me if I was interested in taking part of a TEDx event organised at the National Space Centre in Leicester.
The theme for the event was ‘One Step Beyond’ and its focus was around application of satellite science and technology. As introduced by the organisers, the aim for the event would be to showcase a variety of ideas in applying satellite science and technology to solve complex real world problems and the audience would be comprised of commercial businesses and SME’s, educational leaders and professional, students and pre-university students.
First, I thought that it was a fantastic opportunity for me to showcase all the innovative cool stuffs we were doing at Bird.i and I was already thinking on the best way to pack them all in a 15min talk.
But then I took a bit more time to watch other TED talks, including the excellent talk from Simon Sinek about “How great leaders inspire action”, and asked myself: if there is one thing I want the audience to remember from my talk, what would that be?
Certainly not all the variety of ideas and technologies we were developing with the team, or the type of complex real world problems we are addressing, the message would be too diffuse and I would not know where to start from.
So I looked back to my own background and experience and thought that if I am in a position today to have so many innovative ideas and technologies addressing complex real world problems, it is not because they were easy to develop and given to me, it is because I have always had a vision, and executed on it.
So, I decided that if I was going to make this TEDx talk, the thing I wanted the audience to remember would be that we can all become space entrepreneurs, but for this we have to EXECUTE.
Indeed, technology trends such as big data from space, the commoditisation of cloud solutions and the release of many artificial intelligence technologies in open source, lowered massively some barriers to entry which were very high until recently.
We just have now to create a world class team, develop ideas addressing specific problems into products that would be purchased by many customers, to finally tap in, or create new markets; but that requires a great level of execution.
