A strategy for civilian-military innovation systems

Purpose and goal:

The new geopolitical landscape has put dual-use between civilian and military applications in focus and the war in Ukraine has shown that a very high pace is possible in combined civilian-military innovation. Also, Sweden´s NATO-membership has opened up NATO´s innovation structure to us but the Swedish innovation system is not adapted to this. The project proposes a long-term innovation infrastructure to enhance the capabilities of the Swedish innovation system to better meet these challenges.

Expected results and effects:

The involved competence spans from Swedish innovation experts and practitioners, over experts from the Swedish public and defence sectors, to international military experts. We will propose an innovation infrastructure that systematically supports innovations from startups to reach dual-use. The danger in this process lies in the risk of luring startups into bankruptcy by false promises of reaching a military market while in reality achieving these business deals is very challenging.

Approach and implementation:

The project draws on the experiences from innovation projects taking startup and scaleup innovations towards dual-use and from forming the two NATO STO Research Task Groups (RTG) that we lead (NATO STO RTG SAS-202 and SAS-203). Proposals based one these experiences will be presented for, and then evolved iteratively, by six involved panels. The six panels are four project consortia from Swedish innovation projects centered around startups, and the two NATO Research Task Groups.