A nimble flier finds its air space

Being small can be an advantage. Marinvent is small, but the high-tech aerospace company in Montreal competes against the big shots, and it and sells to some of the world’s leading manufacturers, all thanks to its agility, top-flight talent and ability to innovate.

John Maris, president, is a former military test pilot with degrees in engineering and management. Rather than think outside the box, “We try not to have the box in the first place,” he says. The company has 25 employees, including 12 in Moscow, and two in the United States. It sells its expertise in Canada, the U.S., and as far off as New Zealand.

Interior view of Avanti test plane
Photo: Courtesy of Marinvent

What lesson for small business is contained in your success?
It’s knowing and understanding what our core competence is and exploiting it very thoroughly. We tend to overwhelm the people we deal with in our capability to do work. Let’s take NASA. Of course NASA can do what we can do. But you might have to go through five different NASA centres in five to 10 locations. In our case, that same capability is sitting in three rooms in our main office in Montreal. If you want to speak to a flight test pilot or helicopter flight test pilot or a PhD mathematician, they are immediately adjacent to each other.If you take Boeing, do you need Boeing St. Louis, Seattle, Chicago? And even in Seattle, you can’t throw a rock from one end of the plant to the other. The people you want to be liaising with might be that far apart. When you claim you have a turnkey solution and a question is thrown over the fence at you, in an hour you can have an answer that might take six months to come out of a big company.

Tell me about your company’s services.
We reduce the risk of implementing new technology, typically for aerospace high-tech projects. We have a grouping of experts in the various fields in aviation and very specialized equipment. We’ve got one of the most advanced research aircraft in the world and a simulator that supports it. We caucus all these resources and try to address what the customer is trying to achieve, rather than how they are trying to achieve it. You’ve heard the phrase thinking outside the box. The question becomes what’s a box. We try not to have the box in the first place. That means we often come up with completely different solutions than have been tried before.

Do you have an example of a project?
We invented the industry of electronic aeronautical charts. The world standard, which is about 80% of the world market runs using our technology. Aeronautical charts used to be produced in little pieces of paper updated twice a week by post. The main provider was shipping about two billion sheets a year, and the pilots were updating this stuff every two weeks. We managed to get every single chart in the world on one CD-ROM in 1996, when CD-ROMs themselves were quite new. We decided to make our charting technology have the same level of reliability and integrity as the navigation system on the aircraft. Because if you put a good position on a bad map, you end up with a bad position.

Tell me about your research aircraft.
We developed a chameleon airplane, whose cockpit and software can be almost all things to all people. It can change personalities. We can actually fly technologies while they are still experimental prototypes. Imagine you drive a Honda Accord and I suddenly said, “I want you to show on the instrument panel the readings you would have driving a Via Rail express between Montreal and Ottawa. Well, we could do that with our aircraft without cutting holes in the panel or changing wires. It’s a unique concept. The triple navigation systems for the Japan Airlines 747 were flight-tested and certified completely in our aircraft, with the exception of one flight in the real machine to show that it conformed to what we said. Normally all those flights would have been done in the real aircraft. So you can imagine the savings to that customer. We can fly 90% of the flight envelope of anything that might be thrown at us, and we can prototype equipment that is two generations ahead of the most futuristic things that are flying today.

Where do you find the skilled people you need?
The Russian team we picked up right after the fall of communism, when extremely highly qualified people were available at very low rates. Now we pay them very comparable salaries to the West, but at the time we were a startup and couldn’t afford that. We got PhDs and ex-space people at a very competitive rate. My brother ran an operation that had Russian roots and I piggybacked on to what he was doing, but then I picked up the core of four people, which has now expanded to the dozen we have. The Canadians are almost all from ETS, École de Technologie Supérieure [part of the University of Quebec in Montreal]. We picked up young students [who had] just finished their degrees in computer science or engineering. Then they apprenticed with us. Seven or eight years later they are project managers with a lot of responsibility on their hands.

How do you get your name out globally?
We’re not very good at it, actually. We don’t have any dedicated marketers. We have technical marketers who go to conferences. We have won many industry awards, which helps quite a bit. By far the largest component is word of mouth.