Challenges

Our greatest challenge is to formulate an R&D pathway that will allow us to better serve existing customers and provide an increased competitive edge for bidding on new work.

Solution

For Sonalysts to maintain its competitive advantage and entrepreneurial spirit, we need to stay on the cutting edge. To that end, Sonalysts’ innovators identified the need for an enhanced R&D process. We compiled a talented team of partners spanning multiple disciplines who founded the HAIL program. HAIL routinely looks to the horizon for new opportunities, scans Small Business Innovative Research topics for emerging trends, collaborates with group and technical leads to determine where value can be added, and aims to inspire individual partners to pursue ideas that excite them.

In any given year, HAIL methods, tools, technologies, and publications are leveraged on 5-10 programs for various customers. This portfolio includes both "homegrown" projects (projects which are based entirely on one or more of HAIL’s indirect research projects) and collaborative efforts (projects where HAIL is providing support to another line of work). Since HAIL’s inception, it has grown to become a central repository for partners to explore, learn, fail, build, and adapt, gaining the experience and tools they need to successfully execute a projects across our growing list of clients.

Benefits

HAIL has broadened our focus beyond only Human Factors R&D. HAIL projects are almost always a cross-discipline effort between the social sciences and computational sciences. Not only are these diverse projects more successful, but they leverage one of the most unique elements of the Sonalysts structure: the incredible variety of technical and operational domain expertise.