"If ever there was a time for seizing the day, then that time is now," John Summers, CEO of RF Engines tells Electronics Weekly.
"Economies globally have taken a fair beating, and there is the lingering danger that we continue to talk ourselves down into further doom and gloom.
"But there are clear signs of improvement in certain industries, especially for those companies that are in the right technology sectors and which are agile enough to respond rapidly to new opportunities.
"Generalising of course, but what better market could one choose to be in than electronics? Electronics is the enabler for so much that is exciting in these current times.
"The need to access information quickly and before other people is all-pervading, whether that harvesting of data and the rapid analysis of it, is in the media, in communications, finance, defence or in the surveillance society - the list goes on.
"At the same time, we’re all wrestling with the deluge of information that is being thrown at us – so we have to develop and improve intelligent sensors and technologies to help us to sort out the wheat from the chaff. So electronics is where it’s all happening, and for those companies that can ‘lift their heads’ from fighting the alligators, the big opportunities are there to be exploited.
Many significant commercial opportunities are the result of relatively low risk developments - by applying existing technologies into new and developing markets. In recent years, I’ve been involved in military specification power supplies being redesigned for commercial in-flight entertainment systems, and military amplifiers adapted for commercial satellite communications and maritime navigation systems.
"More recently, my company took signal processing cores designed for radio astronomy and adapted them for use in naval warfare sensors, and so on.... When you boil it down, it’s not that radical! However, developing an agile organisation that can sense such opportunities and respond quickly and innovatively to them as they arise, is rapidly becoming a key trait that determines those companies which will be successful.
"The next 12 months are going to decide for many companies whether they (as one friendly investor refers to it) join ‘the living dead’ or whether they catch the next wave of prosperity. Carpe diem! (or as Nike would say ‘Just Do It!’)."