The Defense Innovation Readiness Gap Is Widening

In 2021, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) Innovation Board and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) conducted a comprehensive review of defense ministries’ innovation activities across 59 countries. The results, published in 2022, quantified for the first time the innovation readiness gap – the gap between ministries’ aspirations for innovation and their ability to generate such results.

In late 2022, BCG conducted a second comprehensive review. The MSC-BCG study team sent a survey to the same group of 59 ministries of defense, the European Union, and NATO to assess innovation readiness across 11 dimensions, enabling MoDs to compare their current innovation readiness to their previous year’s performance, and to that of their private-sector counterparts.