Investigating the capabilities and the competitiveness of the EU vis-à-vis its main competitors in developing civilian technologies with critical spillovers into the defence

This study proposes a framework for investigating the relevance of dual use inventions, i.e., military applications of civilian patents. The data collected extends the companion report that focused on the opposite direction of dual use: from military inventions to civilian applications (Caviggioli et al., 2018). The analyses focus on 10 million patent families from selected patent offices in the years 2002-2015. The method proposed identified 85,034 defence inventions (0.9%) that were compared with the civilian inventions along several dimensions (time, geography, technological clusters). This study operationalises dual use from both a civilian to a military application (CM dual use) and in the opposite direction (MC dual use). The presence of CM dual inventions is 1.4% of the total civilian sample, with a slightly decreasing trend. They are four times the MCs in absolute numbers. The geographical analysis reveals heterogeneity: the US is the origin of 58.7% of the total dual use inventions identified in the sample and shows the highest incidence of cases (4.7% of all civilian inventions). The results also indicate significant heterogeneity in the share of domestic knowledge flows. The domestic spillover for dual in most of the countries examined is lower than for non-dual: a military application of a civilian innovation is a relatively more frequent occurrence outside the borders of the country with the exceptions of the USA, France, and the Russian Federation. The share of domestic CM dual use in the EU28 area is 36%, smaller than the corresponding non-dual value (42%).