Saab’s Jenny Gardner on international affairs, innovation and career highlights

Tell me about your career to date and how you ended up in the fascinating role you are now doing.

Today I am Head of Strategy & Portfolio for the Combat Systems business at Saab – a role which indeed is fascinating in many ways.

I am a bit of a polymath, using the word in the most humble sense, with interests in several different areas and this is also reflected in my career.

I have spent most of my livelihood with building international business. This has nicely played in to my interest in delivering results and my enthusiasm for people in general as well as for understanding languages and culture. Then I always had an affinity for technology development and for innovation. I have spent considerable time in that particular field. And last but not least I also thoroughly enjoyed my work for UK government as it gave me a great helicopter view of the world and taught me how satisfying it can be to work with a clear purpose to serve. I met some incredibly clever and dedicated civil servants and that was very inspiring.

So you could say that all of that brings it nicely together to my present role. I get to work with international business and technology development. As I predominantly work on the defence side of the house of the company it also demands a lot of thinking around purpose and how to best serve. Saab has a clear vision – and that that is to keep people and society safe. I find working towards this vision very rewarding from a personal perspective.

From our conversations over the years, I know you’ve done some pretty cool things …What have been some of your career highlights to date?

“Career highlights” – that is a tricky question. I have been leading or been part of some major business deals and I am very proud of my contribution to that. However, I also have had colleagues talking about “the positive team experience” they have had working in my teams. I count that as significant success. I like to see other people grow and be successful.

What has been “pretty cool things”? Well, managing a Royal visit between the Swedish King and Queen and the Prince of the Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to the Vasa Museum in Stockholm was amazing (as part of my job at the British Embassy in Stockholm). I also thought it was very cool to hold a TEDx talk “Understanding diversity: a trick of the trade” in Stockholm (now on Youtube). I found it important to serve as a Global Diversity Champion at DIT for UK Government so that was also cool.

But I find that the work I have been doing, for bilateral understanding, collaboration and trade, between Sweden and the UK, perhaps has to date had the most impact and also been cool from a wider perspective. This includes being part of forwarding defence and FCAS connected collaboration – and maybe the latest example is establishing Saab’s UK Innovation Hub in London.

You have a massive legacy in establishing Saab’s UK Innovation Hub. Tell me about how you set that up.

That is very kind of you to say. Saab has had and has a very clear commitment to the UK. The company has been in the UK for more than 40 years and find the country very likeminded. Saab has also a long history of investing in R&D via the triple helix model – i.e. through collaboration with universities and government.

I managed to land the exciting job to start up an Innovation Hub in the UK to cement Saab’s footprint in the country. I did quite a lot of research and legwork together with my colleagues to be able to author a research strategy and advice Saab on an investment strategy for opening the Hub. We also had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor David Gann and Professor Deeph Chana at Imperial College London and I felt we all had an amazing meeting of minds. The work at the Hub is supporting Saab’s UK-wide network of universities pertaining to R&D in radar technology, electronic warfare, aeronautics and software development and many other areas. I am very happy with the results and the Hub.

What about your role with Saab now – tell me a bit about what that involves?

Maybe first a couple of words about Saab. The company was founded in 1937 with the primary aim to provide military aircraft for Sweden. The company is also today well known for its aircraft and for our most recent fighter jet “Gripen”. We don’t sell Saab cars (sadly) anymore but it is part of our history. But today we are about 18,000 people worldwide and we serve the global market with hi-tech products, services and solutions for all domains in predominately the defence sector but also in security and general aerospace sectors.

Then, the area I work with in Saab is called – “Combat Systems”. We are a global supplier of Combat and Mission Systems for all domains – air, land and naval. We have customers all over the world but perhaps worth a special mention is our strong other home market Australia and also the fabulous news from this summer - that we have received a contract to modernise the German Navy’s F123 Frigates (with an order value of approximately 4,6 billion SEK). This further underpins our truly international footprint.

So what about my role as Head of Strategy & Portfolio for Combat Systems? I am very much a software and systems thinker and that perspective is vital for my role as well as for most businesses today. My job is to give good strategic advice in my area – which then can be used for successful decision making. That means that I spend my day with number crunching, working with R&D and business/technology development as well as working with general management. But my role also means a lot of important collaboration with internal and external stakeholders. And that is how you go from paper to action.

Additionally I do work in our Space Team and am an active member of our Saab Global Innovation Network (consisting of SAAB’s global technical leaders from all around the world). Both are important facets of my day job adding to the perspective needed for also being able to do a good strategy job.

I’ve been really enjoying the new ‘Zero pressure’ podcast you created with Imperial College. What made you want to create it and what plans do you have for the future?

Thank you Scott, that is lovely of you to say. The “Zero Pressure” podcast is something I am very committed to. I came up with the concept after realising that meeting each other and communications would be so much more difficult during the Covid lock-down. I have gotten brilliant support from my Saab colleagues and this is a wonderful collaboration between the technology side of the house and our communications department. Today I am the Chair of the Editorial Board which manages the content and selection of guests.

Initially we started the podcast as an outreach project but it has grown in to something really imperative to me. We are producing the podcast in collaboration with Imperial College and we began the journey together with looking at the overarching aims of the two organisations. And with that backdrop we created the podcast as an opportunity to discuss important technology topics with world class experts and pioneers, to look to the future and consider how we can make technology useful for global progress and resilience. And we have a wonderful host for the podcast to lead this discussion. UK’s first astronaut Helen Sharman who is an absolutely brilliant moderator. She guides our guests through very thrilling and sometimes complicated topics.

We have so far published an episode on the theme “Space 2050” where Helen herself discusses her expectations with Sweden’s first astronaut Christer Fuglesang. Absolutely fascinating! The second episode is about “Autonomous Systems and the rules of right and wrong”. This time it is an absorbing discussion with two professors and experts in their field about how to integrate technology in to our society – the challenges and the opportunities. Very, very topical – and I think everyone would benefit from listening to this particular episode. Autonomous systems are already an important part of our everyday and will be so even more in the future.

The latest episode was about the next generation of AI – also called “the third wave of AI”. This AI is not only about learning but this AI needs to be able to reason and generalize, basically mimicking human abilities. The AI needs to be transparent and able to describe what it is doing and why it is doing it. We are discussing, with leading experts in the field, “Is this third wave possible?”, “What could the applications look like?” and many other questions.

And the next episode will be an extremely interesting podcast episode about quantum computing. When will we get a useful quantum computer and what will that really mean? We will be joined by some international quantum super-stars and the episodes will be thrilling – so please do stay tuned.