Characterisation of Technological Collaborations and Evolution in the Spanish Defence Industry

ABSTRACT

Collaboration with technological partners as an innovation strategy has become widespread in recent years, and all sectors are immersed in this process. In particular, the defence industry is characterised by the technological complexity of the products and services offered, together with a constant innovation process. However, data that allow us to identify characteristics that are found in collaboration contracts are not usually available in this sector. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by studying the different characteristics of both the technological partners and the development agreements for the 1999-2017 period. This is possible thanks to a database of more than 300 collaboration technology agreements between public and private organisations and the Spanish Ministry of Defence. The results provide the Ministry of Defence with a clear picture of the type of collaborations in the Defence industry, their partners and their behaviour under different economic conditions, which will help it identify the type of collaborations that can contribute to improving the design of its innovation strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Technological collaborations
• spanish Ministry of Defence
• cluster analysis

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to two anonymous referees and participants at the 23rd annual International Conference on Economics and Security and VII National Meeting on Defence and Security R&D (DESEi+d 2019) for helpful suggestions and comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/defence/skills_en.

2. Approved for the first time in 2010.

3. Ministry of Defence. Defence Innovation and Technological Strategy (2015).

4. In some cases, part of this information is missing.

5. The economic crisis started in Spain in 2008; there was a slight recovery in 2011 but a second recession emerged in 2012 (Linde 2014).

6. The budget of the Spanish MoD fell from 0.77 of the GDP in 2007 to 0.54 in 2014 (Pérez Muinelo 2015, p.100).

7. H2020 EU Research and Innovation programme aims at facilitating public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation and that acknowledges emerging technologies with dual use and new security challenges as relevant issues. https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/what-horizon-2020

8. Dunn test is a non-parametric pairwise multiple-comparison procedure with Bonferroni correction.

9. Hierarchical means that all clusters formed consist of mergers of previously formed clusters.

10. Agglomerative indicates that the method begins with as many clusters as there are observations and end with a single cluster containing all observations.

11. Agustín Conde Bajén, Secretary of State for Defence in 2017, stated that the MoD has striven to develop a more cohesive industry, and to promote and prepare SMEs through R&D and productive investments (IDS (Information and Design Solutions) 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by project grants ECO2016-77-P (AEI/FEDER, UE), ECO2016-76255-P and PID2019-106642GB-I00, project 27267 CUD-UNIZAR, project CUD 2018-12 and the COMPETE (S52_20R) research group (Government of Aragón -Spain- and FEDER 2020-2022 ‘Construyendo Europa desde Aragón’);Centro Universitario de Defensa Zaragoza [CUD 2018-12];Gobierno de Aragón (ES)-FEDER [S52_17R COMPETE];Universidad de Zaragoza [UZCUD2018-SOC-04] and European Union;