The DSEI Connect TV Fireside Chat will explore the collaboration between the Defence Innovation Directorate, MoD innovation teams, Defence and Aerospace SME membership organisations and the FCAS industry partners to jointly evolve of the existing way that SMEs are engaged, their innovations accelerated and the capabilities exploited.  The Fireside Chat will start to explore how to augment existing company specific supply chains with a common and shared approach for a GCAP SME ecosystem that both incubates earlier TRL or new SME participants to be ready to engage in a future supply chain but also better enable the existing SMEs in the supply chain to collaborate more widely across the consortium of industry partners as well as with each other. 

The collaboration is not seeking to reinvent the wheel but rather take existing good practice, programmes, platforms and operational approaches developed across the organisations and integrate them, or further develop them, to create an SME ecosystem programme for GCAP.  With an agile and continuous development approach the programme will  ensure that all the participants in the ecosystem help continually shape its design with positive intent and always with the mission of driving value creation for all.   As best practices are proven, these can be adapted and utilised by the innovation outreach by the MoD and NATO to their own ecosystems of SMEs as well as the opportunity for the FCAS SME's to engage with the MoD and NATO's ecosystem programmes.