Inside NATO’s plans to rev up an ‘innovation engine’ for dual-use technologies

WASHINGTON — NATO is hoping the strategic development of dual-use technologies among the alliance partners will lead to the creation of what one official is calling an “innovation engine” to stay ahead of technological advancements posed by adversaries.

At the center of the alliances plan are two different efforts targeting commercial sector technology. The first is the NATO Innovation Fund, an effort to invest €1 billion in technology development for startups. The second is the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), launched last June by NATO leaders and set to become fully operational on June 19. 

“We’re aiming to support the best and brightest innovators to develop dual-use technologies to solve security and defense problems,” Deeph Chana, DIANA’s managing director, told reporters Tuesday ahead of the news. 

DIANA will work with 30 startups this year, with three focus portfolios: energy and resilience, sensing and surveillance and secure information sharing. Each company will be awarded starting grants worth €100,000, but the companies will then have an opportunity to get a larger €300,000 investment after six months. 

“Overall, we have a multi-million euro budget for this year and an annual budget going forward and in the future years of around €50 million,” Chana said. “We will also be looking to grow that through leverage and other different mechanisms. That’s going to be a job for me to kind of grapple with over the next few years. But already you can see that it’s quite a serious commitment that we’ve got in place for a multi-year program.”

Chana said that NATO is “very explicitly encouraging startups to have applications in the more traditional tactical military domain, as well as…in a sort of civil space, such that they have a diverse opportunity for revenue which we think builds more resilient, more investable companies in this space.

“And this is a key feature of DIANA and a key differentiator we believe from any other similar kind of program that exists probably anywhere in the world,” he added.

Innovation And Ukraine Applications

With the energy and resilience portfolio, startups will be tasked with evolving technologies that can ensure resilient energy supply — everything from creating “energy generation components themselves” to mesh networking from an energy perspective, Chana said. 

On the sensing and surveillance side, NATO will be looking at how it can produce next-gen detectors and sensor systems that can “interrogate” difficult environments, particularly underwater. 

“Historically, it’s a difficult place for us to be able to have high accuracy, low-power footprint detection systems, which give us very, very persistent kind of situational awareness,” Chana said. “And again, the kinds of problems that we’re solving there are going to be…securing undersea infrastructure and undersea cables, and just generally having a better situational awareness in that environment.”

Chana said the last area, secure information sharing, will focus on how communication systems share data between points A and B in a manner that is secure, efficient and low-cost. That kind of technology would be vital for everything from the Pentagon’s top-level Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort to the kind of pop-up networking that has seen widespread success in Ukraine.

“So when you bring all of these different factors together in this idea of secure information sharing, particularly in denied environments where we don’t necessarily have great power, we don’t have great connectivity and all these kinds of challenging scenarios which we see in conflict scenarios, for example, in disaster zones,” he said. “That’s the kind of domain that we’re trying to address with the secure information sharing challenge.” 

Although the three focus areas for the pilot weren’t necessarily informed by the ongoing war in Ukraine, the conflict “exemplifies” the need for having an entity like DIANA, Chana said. 

“So it both shows us the kind of the need for solving the kind of problems that we’re going after and it also shows us the utility of being able to have innovation and… [an] innovative mindset, because a lot of the solutions that we’re seeing emerging from the Ukrainian conflict on the Ukrainian side…are pretty phenomenal,” he said. “I think…the record shows that there’s a huge amount of internal innovation and agility being exercised, which is proving to be very…useful and very, very effective.”

Through the first phase of the DIANA pilot program, “accelerator sites” in Seattle and Boston will be used for startups to test their technologies. Chana said startups will have access to 11 deep tech acceleration sites and over 90 test centers from across the alliance. 

“We want to give people permission to fail quickly, right?,” Chana said. “Because one of the things that we see in defense and security is quite often that innovation, when it goes to a test or to a trial, it’s really not really an experimental place for people to actually fail in a safe way. They get to expose all of their flaws. And then unfortunately, what happens is quite often is that that’s the end of it right? If they fail in that environment, it’s kind of like curtains for their development.”