Man­age­ment Re­search in Time of Heightened De­fense and Se­cur­ity

1 Changing Global Security and Defence Realities

Recent geopolitical events—such as the disruption of global value chains, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—have challenged how we used to do business. In Europe, governments, industry and academia are particularly challenged, as their long-trusted US ally is disrupting transatlantic economic, political and military priorities. In parallel, industrial R&D and innovation are exposed to several concurrent and interconnected crises, some with origins going back many years, and none of them are going to be resolved easily. These challenges raise the question of the role, purpose and importance of innovation in a more uncertain world. There is a pronounced determination among many European leaders to renew and develop local capabilities for achieving defence readiness in the near term and to reignite, cultivate and augment European capabilities in key technologies. These are tall orders for both practitioners and scholars of creativity and innovation management.

Governments across the board have promised to massively invest in the modernization and capacity acquisition of national armed forces and the monitoring and protection of key infrastructures from physical as well as cyberattacks in Europe and beyond. These additional financial resources for national defence and technology have been confirmed at the NATO summit in June 2025, where national commitments were raised to 5% of GDP per country (NATO 2025). For most countries, this change represents a substantial increase in public spending on defence. Evidently, this must come at the expense of other areas of civil society such as health care, education, research funding and, perhaps most prominently, investments in climate change and sustainability. But they also represent quasitectonic shifts in R&D spending and will influence the research and innovation landscape, especially in Europe. The ongoing attacks on infrastructures, both physical (e.g., the deliberate destruction of seabed data cables in the Baltic Sea) and digital (e.g., by foreign interference in national elections through orchestrated social media campaigns), raise additional concerns not only for the necessary protective competencies of governments but especially for companies that are less well equipped to counter such attacks. Hence, the sense of urgency to deal with the immediate threats shifts investments into defence and security technologies.

This increased need for enhanced defence and security capabilities is further accentuated by the disrupted global supply chains and innovation systems. Global division of labour, based on powerful and efficient supply chains, has benefited the long-term development of technological capabilities and the growth of national economies. But the willingness to internationally coordinate and safeguard the necessary investments in research and innovation can be undermined by threats of elevated tariffs, mobility restrictions and growth in political and social particularism. As a result, there is a noticeable shift towards more regionalized strategies for technological development and procurement, in general, and in defence and security, in particular, at the European or even national level.

The urgent need for building military capacity through acquisition of ‘tanks and rockets’ is at first sight a contradiction to promoting processes and tools for defence and security innovation (DSI). Research has demonstrated that investment for and subsequent building of such capabilities is extremely time-consuming and prone to uncertainty; there is no evidence suggesting that it should be any different this time around. The need for revitalization of the European innovation capacity has been a longstanding topic, and investments by the European Commission have been substantial. The European ambition to develop and implement highly advanced technology systems in defence and security is confronted with a low-performing European innovation landscape. EU companies spend less on research and innovation (R&I) than US counterparts (European Commission 2025). Despite minor improvements in performance in 2024, the overall state of European innovation performance is stagnating and stays behind the United States and Canada (European Commission 2025). The Draghi (2024) report advocates that Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the United States and China, especially in advanced technologies, highlighting the lack of dynamism in Europe as a key challenge and reminding us that EU companies are specialized in mature technologies where the potential for breakthroughs is limited.

Although there has been much mutual inspiration between the defence and civilian sectors, certain key factors and framework conditions are fundamentally different. From an innovation management perspective, these differences provide fertile ground for scholarly inquiry and necessitate tailored managerial approaches to foster effective innovation outcomes. In combination, the specific characteristics of innovating in defence and security may not only be about increased levels of uncertainty. DSI may even be a case where management needs to tackle the challenges of unknowns rather than uncertainties (Hatchuel 2023). This perspective questions most of our established creativity and innovation management approaches that were developed to manage a world of uncertainty. Managing creativity and innovation in defence and security may be much closer to managing radical innovations—in this case not only radically new products and services but orchestrating and managing radically new systems, a new set of capabilities in their own right.

Following the definition of defence innovation by Cheung et al. (2011), we broaden the scope and define defence and security innovation as the transformation of ideas and knowledge into new or improved products, processes and services for military, dual-use and security applications. Thereby, we offer a more comprehensive definition than military innovation to also encompass the innovative efforts of civilian and commercial actors around defence and security needs. In contrast to civilian sectors, R&D and innovation in defence-related industries are characterized by the presence of government-related stakeholders, focusing on secrecy and technological performance, public procurement and national security, with less emphasis on commercial profitability, cost efficiency, time to market and market performance.

Considering the current realities, the reawakening of European innovation performance must be achieved quickly. In fact, the strong need and urgency for engaging in DSI may be the very catalyst for rebuilding strength in the European innovation ecosystem, enabling the system in supporting the creation of new capacities. As such, the heavy public investments in DSI may inspire private companies to make complementary investments in DSI. Simultaneously, we expect that the call for action and redirection of investments towards DSI will ultimately cannibalize innovation opportunities in other domains, for example, innovations mitigating or adapting to climate change.

Collectively, these challenges are substantial and require more attention and investments to build new innovation capabilities, develop new technologies, align processes and possibly create new organizational forms. Systemic challenges have always been central in motivating creativity and innovation management scholars, and much can be taken from the research already performed in the past. In particular, recent research addressing grand societal challenges may serve as a starting point for this discussion (Mignacca et al. 2025). Nevertheless, the new sense of urgency and the magnitude of what is at stake raise the question of what we, as researchers of creativity and innovation management, can and will offer within and for a defence- and security-related innovation ecosystem. As such, this article aims to start a discourse about the novel research agendas that emerge and about the consequential ethical choices that we must address to pursue research in defence and security.