The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) has done its main job over the past 70-plus years – protecting its now 30-strong list of national members through a mutual defence policy.
But as the nature of the threat to these countries shifts so the calls for Nato to respond and use the entrepreneurial community better has grown louder.
From facing Soviet-era tanks to cyber-warfare that can take down utilities or the banks means the risks and responses become harder to gauge.
Naturally, Nato has an acronym for its response – Diana, the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. Combined with a planned multinational innovation fund where members can commit funding of about $70m per year and support – similar to how the US intelligence community uses In-Q-Tel as a strategic venture unit, Nato hopes to tackle emerging technologies coming out of research centres and startups.
Nato will use its 5,000 scientists as test centres to validate emerging and disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum, autonomy, hypersonics and bioengineering human enhancement.
The accelerator network will then accelerate the growth and viability of deep tech startups with potential security and defence application through grants.
But, unsurprisingly, it about more than fostering innovation. It will also be about “protecting our innovation from licit and illicit transfer of technology,” Nato said in a press briefing. This means stopping non-members accessing the technology as well other VCs that are less supportive of startups.
Nato is also keen to set the standards and ethics for use for these emerging technologies. Partly, this concern is about the interoperability of technologies among its 30 allies but also because the use of killer robots as one example is emotive to the public but built from a lot of different technologies that by themselves are unthreatening: data in an autonomous vehicle with AI.
And this potential for so-called dual use emerging and disruptive technologies to come out of civilian use or laboratories is why setting up Diana to complement its existing procurement and tendering process with mainly big industrial groups.
It is reconnecting to the place where the innovation now happens, and innovation doesn’t happen only in the bigger traditional companies. Innovation doesn’t come from the defence sector, as it used to do 40 or 30 years ago with the internet, and then spin out to consumers. It is now the other way around.
And while it might be frustrating this realisation has taken so long to sink in, as a popular Chinese proverb says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
