Issue link: https://resources.esri.ca/i/911383
Editorial Editorial Philippe Letellier In this magazine you will discover a vision of the future by Jan Segerstam, the importance of SMEs with stories about Esri Canada and SRDC, the global focus with Canada, the secure society objective with IDEA4SWIFT and the partnership spirit with Systematic. All these values are the heart of ITEA. ITEA stands for advanced innovation and the realisation of an envisioned future. I encourage you to read the visionary paper of Jan Segerstam on energy. He is surely one of the best visionaries I have met on energy. I appreciate his balanced vision between local optimisation and system optimisation, taking into account open future and legacy, thanks to the ITEA projects SEAS and M2MGrids. Once more ITEA is seizing the future. Canada is a strong new country in ITEA. Randy Zadra explains the impact of software in Canada, stressing how the software revolution is impacting all the different industries. In ITEA we are fully in line with Randy on such positions and we are pleased by his account of how Canadian companies can take advantage and feel comfortable in our community. Yes, the European ITEA platform is becoming a more global organisation in line with a more global market. It is always an honour to welcome in our magazine a successful entrepreneur like Alex Miller, founder of Esri Canada, a geographical information system company. He explains that his product is software but the challenge is usage and change management. He lets us in to the PS-CRIMSON digital twins, the neocortex of smart cities. When you are a regular traveller you experience long queues at the control gate. This hampers our daily lives or, should I say, hampered. Read the IDEA4SWIFT article, an ITEA success story which revolutionises the control gate with multi-biometric systems, speeding up the flow and increasing the level of security. Please mail me whenever you encounter such a gate. ITEA is working for the good of our society. ITEA is a unique tool to steer R&D towards market impact, but we know it remains a continuous challenge for any organisation. The good balance between advanced innovation and strong roots in market reality isn't a given. Cooperation between companies of worldwide impact, agile and innovative SMEs and the academic community is not easy. We aren't alone in having been able to build such a good balance; there are some national clusters which are similar in nature with whom we have built a long-term relationship. Have a look at the description of the French Cluster Systematic Paris Region given by its President Jean-Luc Beylat, a renowned person in ITEA. We cherish SMEs because they represent the new emerging generation of large companies. You experienced the new tools we set up during the DIF2017 to strengthen their visibility at the European level. We will continue in this direction. I am pleased to welcome in this magazine the SRDC story. This company is working on 'infobesity' (the overload of information) to transform raw data into actual information in the smart health Medolution project. This confirms the agility of the ITEA framework. SRDC appreciates the ITEA bottom-up approach and proposes some enhancements for ITEA. My thanks to them for that. ITEA is so exciting that you cannot afford to miss out on creating new projects and participating in the PO Days on 12 and 13 September in Berlin. Also read the international customer workshop report on smart manufacturing. It gathers actual customer issues that provide targets for you to position your proposals if you want to push a project on these topics. Look forward seeing you in Berlin! Philippe Letellier 3 July 2017 – no. 27