Suddenly, it seems, everyone cares about Europe’s defence innovation ecosystem. NATO is setting up the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, with a significant presence in Europe. The European Commission is working on the EU Defence Innovation Scheme, EUDIS. And last month, Amazon Web Services announced it is setting up a private defence accelerator in the UK.
But details of the DIANA and EUDIS initiatives have been slow to emerge, leading to concerns that gaps and barriers to innovation remain to be addressed. EUDIS in particular leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
“It’s a step in the right direction, but whether it is enough is deeply debatable,” said Nicholas Nelson, senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington DC. “And this will not be figured out in the next year or two. It will take five or ten years to see what the impact is.”
This sentiment is echoed by Alain De Neve, a specialist in defence innovation at Belgium’s Royal Higher Institute for…
