From Lab to Battlefield: How the Department of War Is Rebuilding the Technology Transfer Pipeline

Innovation has never been the Department of War’s problem.

Transition has.

For decades, the DoW has invested billions of dollars in cutting-edge research across its laboratories, universities, and federally funded programs. Those investments have produced world-class technologies—many with clear potential beyond the lab. Yet too often, they stall before reaching the field, the market, or the warfighter. The gap between invention and implementation has become one of the most persistent structural challenges in defense innovation. That reality—and the effort now underway to change it—was the focus of the Defense Patent Holiday Industry Day, a pilot program designed to fundamentally rethink how defense-origin technologies move from lab to launch.

The takeaway was unambiguous:

The future of defense innovation depends on speed, scalability, and commercial viability—not defense-only solutions.

Technology Transfer Is No Longer Administrative—It’s Strategic

One of the most important shifts highlighted during the program was the reframing of technology transfer itself. Historically, tech transfer within the Department of War was treated as a back-office function: necessary, procedural, but peripheral. That mindset is changing fast. Across the DoW, leaders are now treating technology transfer, transition, and commercialization as strategic capabilities tied directly to:

• Military readiness

• Supply chain resilience

• Economic and industrial base security

• Speed of capability delivery to the warfighter

This shift reflects hard lessons learned over the past decade. Systems built exclusively for the DoW—without commercial markets, commercial manufacturing, or commercial incentives—are fragile by design. They are slow to scale, expensive to sustain, and vulnerable to disruption.

By contrast, technologies that succeed commercially tend to be:

• Iterated faster

• Produced at scale

• Supported by more resilient supply chains

The implication is clear: commercial success is no longer incidental to defense capability—it is increasingly a prerequisite.

Moving Away from Defense-Only Thinking

Across sessions, Department of War leaders were explicit about what they are moving away from:

• Single-customer supply chains where the government bears all risk

• Bespoke systems built solely for defense use

• Slow, linear pathways from research to acquisition

And equally explicit about where they are going:

• Dual-use technologies with real commercial market pull

• Early engagement with private industry and capital

• Parallel pathways for commercialization and military transition

This is not about “commercializing for commercialization’s sake.” It is about recognizing that commercial markets create scale—and scale creates speed, resilience, and sustainability in an increasingly contested global technology environment.

Why IP and Data Infrastructure Matter More Than Ever

A recurring theme throughout the Defense Patent Holiday was that transition cannot accelerate without modern infrastructure—particularly around intellectual property and data.

The Department of War is actively working to build a more robust IP data estate that:

• Improves visibility into available inventions and patents

• Reduces friction in licensing and partnership formation

• Enables data-driven decisions across acquisition, commercialization, and transition

This may sound technical, but its impact is practical. Industry cannot license what it cannot find. Investors cannot back what they cannot evaluate. Program offices cannot transition what they cannot track. Modernizing how IP is managed, surfaced, and analyzed is foundational to everything else the Department of War is trying to do.

From Concept to Capability: Real Pathways Forward

What made the Defense Patent Holiday particularly compelling was its focus on real pathways, not theory.

Across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and industry participants, presenters highlighted:

• Active patent portfolios available for commercial licensing

• Commercialization Evaluation Licenses that lower barriers to entry

• Case studies where defense-origin technologies entered civilian markets

• Civilian and dual-use applications that later fed back into military capability

These examples reinforced a central truth:

The fastest path to the battlefield increasingly runs through the commercial marketplace.

What This Means for Industry—and Why Execution Matters

The Department of War is clearly rebuilding the technology transfer pipeline. But rebuilding the system is only half the challenge.

Execution now depends on:

• Translating laboratory inventions into market-ready value propositions

• Structuring licenses and partnerships that attract serious commercial players

• Aligning technical potential with real customer demand—inside and outside government

• Navigating the increasingly complex intersection of IP, acquisition, capital, and transition

This is where many promising technologies still falter—not because the science fails, but because the path to market is unclear or misaligned.

The Bottom Line

The Defense Patent Holiday made one thing clear:

Technology transition is no longer a compliance exercise. It is an operational discipline.

For the Department of War, success means moving faster, scaling smarter, and leveraging commercial ecosystems to deliver resilient capability to the warfighter. For industry, labs, and investors, it means understanding a new innovation landscape—one where commercial viability and defense relevance are no longer separate conversations.

The pipeline is being rebuilt. The next challenge is making it work.