A study of military innovation diffusion based on two case studies

Abstract

The diffusion of military innovations, and how this compares with the diffusion of civil sector innovations, has long been the object of debate in the literature. At the risk of oversimplifying, most of the contributions are in agreement that there are two radically different periods involved:-The first phase, between the end of WW II and the mid-1980s is characterized by the spin-off paradigm in the sense of Alic et al. (1992). The thesis for this period is that military expenditure, the importance and the growth of which was naturally justified by the Cold War context, created significant technological spin-offs into the civil sector. As Sachwald (1999) underlines, this view can be justified fi'om a combination of military and industrial perspectives. The examples given by Sachwald are familiar: the development of semiconductors, of telecommunication satellites, of civil launchers, of aircraft, and of composite materials and other technologies owe a lot to the research and development (R and D) efforts expended within military "big programmes".-The second phase, which emerged progressively from the mid-1980s, can be provocatively interpreted as resting on a quite different mechanism: military expenditure decreased in response to the ending of the Cold War; meanwhile the innovation dynamics shifted towards the civil sector, thereby reversing the direction of technological flow, from the civil to the military sectors (some authors describe this transformation as the spin-in paradigm). This hypothesis is in many respects excessive. Accepting it without qualification runs the risk of erroneous interpretations in terms of industrial policy. For example, within the first phase, it is important to stress that military technologies/7er se were not always at the origin of spin-offs. Such spin-offs were based essentially on the enabling technologies developed for military use (e.g. information and material technologies) and on some of the generic industrial organizational and complex management methods practised within military projects. However, it is clear that within the second phase military projects continued to influence the major technological trajectories (as in the cases of the Internet and Global Positioning Systems (GPS)). The recent successes of high-speed trains and of the Airbus show also that the concept of big technological programmes continues to hold its relevance. Nevertheless, this idea constitutes a major feature of the relationships between civil and military technological diffusion processes by highlighting their contextual dimension. At a given point in time, these relationships depend on the maturity of generic technologies, of the innovation system in place, and on the perception, according to which military and civil efforts are considered to be complements or substitutes. The above remarks lead to a better understanding of the nature of the diffusion process for military innovations and allow its main characteristics to be highlighted. The analysis in this chapter is based on a series of interviews conducted with people responsible for the management and coordination of military radar and missile projects. Our work also benefited from the experience accumulated at BETA fi-om studies conducted in the space sector. However, this chapter mainly focuses on two case studies and should be considered as exploratory work. Our contribution aims simply to highlight some traits, which we consider to be important in relation to the process of innovation diffusion from the military to the civil sector. The chapter is organized in three parts. The first part analyses the contextual characteristics to allow greater understanding of the specificity of military diffusion processes. The second part summarizes the results of our field studies in two firms involved in complex military projects (Thomson-CSF Airsys2 and Matra BAe Dynamics3), which help to illustrate the speci-ficity of the innovation process based on military projects. Finally, we give some brief details about the firms studied concerning the factors that might be relevant for-and have an influence on-the innovation diffusion process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.