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The purpose of this study is to evaluate Department of Defense (DoD)-backed innovation programs as a means of enhancing the adoption of new technology throughout the armed forces.

The distribution of 1.29 million defense contract awards over seven years was analyzed across a data set of more than 8,000 DoD-backed innovation program award recipients. Surveys and interviews of key stakeholder groups were conducted to contextualize the quantitative results and garner additional insights.

Nearly half of DoD innovation program participants achieve no meaningful growth in direct defense business after program completion, and most small, innovative companies that win follow-on defense contracts solely support their initial sponsor branch. Causes for these program failures include the fact that programs do not market participants’ capabilities to the defense community and do not track participant companies after program completion.

Because the DoD does not market the capabilities of its innovation program participants internally, prospective DoD customers conduct redundant market research or fail to modernize. Program participants become increasingly unwilling to invest in the DoD market long term after the programs fail to deliver their expected benefits.

Limited scholarship evaluates the efficacy of DoD-backed innovation programs as a means of enhancing force readiness. This research not only uses a vast data set to demonstrate the failures of these programs but also presents concrete recommendations for improving them – including establishing an “Innovators Database” to track program participants and an incentive to encourage contracting entities and contractors to engage with them.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and compare seven case studies of strategic innovation projects of the Brazilian army; these projects present high transformational potential and high investments and are supported by technology and science policies.

The authors present herein multiple case studies in which the authors conduct a documentary analysis of the innovation processes in the Brazilian army, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with eight servicemen with more than 15 years of working experience.

The results obtained suggest that the innovation process occurs in four stages: creation, selection, development and diffusion of ideas.

The research is relevant because it presents how the interaction between the Brazilian army, companies and academia strengthens the innovation ecosystem, stimulating the development of best practices for the management of strategic projects.

The main contribution of this study is to present the strategic project management of innovation based on public policies and investment in projects of the Brazilian army, which are drivers for the development of ecosystems that promote the creation and expansion of companies, the diffusion of technological knowledge in universities, and suitable solutions for the military sector.

This paper aims to provide a strategic analysis of firms at the lowest hierarchical levels of the defence industry.

This paper presents the main results of an exploratory, multiple-case study that analyses the current strategy drivers and their views about the future ones, and their impact at the lowest hierarchical levels of the defence industry in Spain.

This investigation develops and analyses a contingency model regarding the strategy impact and effects of firms’ drivers and clients, both mediated by the strategy players because of their huge impact on the defence industry. The research model focuses on the internal relations between technical and commercial activities due to the cause and effect of their capabilities. Simultaneously, pull and push mechanisms boost firms’ capabilities and requirements to provide strategic foresight.

Ministries of Defence (MoDs) and prime contractors will remain mediating players in the near future even with further implications for the competition of Defence Technological and Industrial Base (DTIB) firms. It implies that firms and MoDs must maintain a close relation and implement more flexible practices, such as open innovation, property rights or new commercialization schemes.

This study offers insights related to the specific applications and the necessity of commercial and technological areas alignment of these firms for the future.

Focuses on new thinking towards innovation.

Reviews current practices at the UK's Ministry of Defence.

As more and more organisations actively encouraging external input into their “fuzzy front end” of new product innovation, the internet is providing a rapidly expanding channel for this input. In particular, “crowdcasting” practices, such as idea competitions or challenges are becoming increasing popular.

One example of a very traditional organization looking to adopt these new practices in order to achieve wider engagement with possible “solution” providers is the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD), with its Grand Challenge and Competition of Ideas.

At the turn of the year, the US R&D Forecast for 2003, a joint effort of Battelle and R&D Magazine, highlighted that outside factors, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, were deeply impacting the levels of funding for scientific research. According to that forecast a 10.5 percent increase in federal spending, compared to 0.13 percent for industry, would be shaping the near future, with government priorities related to defense seeing significant increases in the 2003 budget, and beyond.

This chapter presents reflections and considerations regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and contemporary and future warfare. As “an evolving collection of computational techniques for solving problems,” AI holds great potential for national defense endeavors (Rubin, Stafford, Mertoguno, & Lukos, 2018). Though decades old, AI is becoming an integral instrument of war for contemporary warfighters. But there are also challenges and uncertainties. Johannsen, Solka, and Rigsby (2018), scientists who work with AI and national defense, ask, “are we moving too quickly with a technology we still don't fully understand?” Their concern is not if AI should be used, but, if research and development of it and pursuit of its usage are following a course that will reap the rewards desired. Although they have long-term optimism, they ask: “Until theory can catch up with practice, is a system whose outputs we can neither predict nor explain really all that desirable?” ¹ Time (speed of development) is a factor, but so too are research and development priorities, guidelines, and strong accountability mechanisms. ²

This paper aims to contribute to the debate of knowledge spillover by presenting a new application for the approach of the technological innovation system (TIS).

Based on the evolutionary economics of the TIS approach, a new framework for knowledge spillover is built and applied to a case. To collect data in studying the case, a mix of quantitative–qualitative methods are used.

TIS approach can help build a framework to analyze knowledge spillover from defense to the civil sector. This framework shows the direct relationship between the functional dynamics of the system and the spillover mechanism..

Sharing the same weakness as TIS, the suggested framework does not pay attention to the contextual factors.

This framework is an analytical tool. It could be used for educational and research purposes, but it has limited power to devise policy guidelines.

This framework is an analytical tool. It could be used for educational and research purposes. But it has limited power to devise policy guidelines.

The paper deviates from the conventional literature of knowledge spillover which uses national level of system analysis. Based on TIS, it adds a new perspective to the literature which had suffered from a limited value of generalizability.