Dear CANEUS colleagues,

To help our worldwide CANEUS community, this “Year-in-Review” offers a snapshot of our activities and tireless efforts of volunteers from all CANEUS member countries.

As we reflect on the year 2007, I would like to take a moment to assess our achievements and what we want to do differently or better in 2008? To help our worldwide CANEUS community, this “Year-in-Review” offers a snapshot of our activities and tireless efforts of volunteers from all CANEUS member countries.

We all are proud that our CANEUS was the first organization in the world to develop a sophisticated, rapid and cost-effective approach to solve the “Valley of Death” problem specifically for the aerospace sector. CANEUS’ pioneering approach was to set about building collaborative consortia from across the globe, aimed at transitioning emerging MNT concepts to systems for aerospace applications. This novel approach of including all of the primary stakeholders, including the innovators, system developers and programmatic sponsors, came out of the recognition that no one organization had the wherewithal to pursue the entire technology development path from concepts to systems by itself.

A cornerstone of the CANEUS strategy is to facilitate international partnerships by working to minimize, or even eliminate, the traditional barriers such as ITAR to such partnerships. I would like to invite all CANEUS colleagues worldwide to participate and contribute fully in order to effectively implement the CANEUS charter, organized into the following three primary components:

• The main CANEUS organization has an administrative role in actively working towards generating worldwide membership from among leading organizations in participating countries, and subsequently setting up committees to facilitate the formation of international consortia aimed at the development of products under specific aerospace technology categories. 

• The biennial CANEUS conferences provide a unique global forum for professionals from all aspects of the technology development pipeline to interact with each other and identify promising MNT concepts that would provide solutions to near term aerospace needs.

• The CANEUS working groups execute the CANEUS strategy and comprise the consortia that are formed around promising technology categories. These CANEUS working groups are essentially semi-autonomous bodies identifying key projects to be undertaken, arranging the funding for the projects, selecting the system-development teams, licensing the IP that is generated, and setting up the entire supply chain for ensuring successful system development. The primary benefit provided by the CANEUS working groups to participating aerospace organizations is to retire the risk involved in the development of high-risk technology elements in a rapid and cost-effective manner.
  

The world desperately needs CANEUS – Global network involving the participation of a greater number of nations, to really enjoy and benefit from the many gifts that MNT has to offer to the Aerospace community worldwide. We all can be really proud of the fact that CANEUS has created the spark to ignite a new and exciting age of collaborative global Aerospace exploration that definitely will be sustained for more than hundred years to come!  Let us all give our best wishes for a prosperous, successful and a Happy New Year in our collective efforts!

Milind