Technological Emergence and Military Technology Innovation

ABSTRACT

To what extent is military technology innovation emergent? This study answers this question by applying an emergence detection algorithm to roughly 300,000 technical terms extracted from military technology patents granted from 1980 to 2019. Emergence – instances of sudden and rapid growth of a technical term within the military patent corpus – is found to vary greatly over time. Military technology innovation during the period of 1996-2008 is found to be highly emergent. This period was found to be characterized by high organization-type diversity; non-traditional vendors, traditional defense contractors, large civilian-facing firms, and individuals generated military patents containing many novel emergent technical terms. However, in recent years, military technology innovation has exhibited markedly less emergence. The period of low emergence is characterized by reduced contributions by non-traditional vendors, defense prime contractors, and individual inventors to military patents containing emergent terms. These observations suggest that policies attempting to ensure a healthy defense innovation ecosystem should seek organization-type diversity and may benefit from employing promotion strategies targeted at distinct organization types.

KEYWORDS:

• Defense innovation
• military technology
• defense industrial base
• defense procurement

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the U.S., the Small Business Innovation Research program aims to increase participation in federal contracting by non-traditional vendors such as startups or other small businesses. There also exists defense-specific evidence of government efforts to increase participation by non-traditional vendors in government contracting. In the last decade, the Department of Defense’s has created organizations such as Defense Innovation Unit, National Security Innovation Network, and DEFENSEWERX, all of which have increasing participation non-traditional defense contractors in their missions.

2. This finding suggests that the recent push within the United States Department of Defense to increase participation in defense contracting (e.g. through increased promotion of the Small Business Innovation Research program or the creation of organizations such as Defense Innovation Unit, National Security Innovation Network, and DEFENSEWERX) are on sound empirical ground.

3. Military technological superiority is by no means a sufficient condition for victory in war. The history of war provides many examples in which technologically superior forces fail to prevail. The case for the study of military technology that is made in this section, merely depends on the technology providing an advantage to its holder, even if not always a decisive one.

4. As there is sometimes a delay associated with populating the Derwent database, 2019 is the most recent year for which the data used here are mostly complete.

5. The use of patents filed at the USPTO facilitates the use of natural language processing because it assures that the patents in question were written in English. While the DII contains patent grant data from many other judications, the text fields in these data are often machine translated. Such machine translations often produce translations that use language that is inconsistent with that used by inventors in their native language and thus distort natural language processing techniques.

6. The term-extracting algorithm is also implemented using VantagePoint software.

7. Emergence score = 2* active period trend + recent period trend + mid-year to most recent year slope.

8. Porter et al. (2019) perform sensitivity analysis supporting the use of the 1.77 cutoff.

9. The patents granted to service- affiliated laboratories such as the Army Research Laboratory, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research are typically granted to the military service branches. Thus, these patents appear in this analysis as associated with the service branch (e.g. US Navy). Litton Systems was a defense contractor eventually acquired by Northrop Grumman. Allied-Signal merged with Honeywell.

10. US Nary and US Army patents include those developed by Navy- and Army-affiliated laboratories.

11. There was substantial overlap in the patents containing the terms ‘improvised explosive device’ and ‘explosive device.’

12. IED fatality data refers to the IED fatalities from Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). OEF fatality data comes from http://icasualties.org/oef/