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Dual technology transfer is a particular case of transfer occurring when a technology developed for military (or civilian) purposes is transferred toward a civilian (or military) application (Molas-Gallart 1998). Rooted in technology transfers, duality reinforces the hypothesis according to which technologies, strictly speaking, are the object of duality, but no longer highlights the intrinsically dual nature of certain technologies.

By differentiating between direct transfers and transfers requiring an adaptation of technology, as well as between transfers operating within the same unit and those involving two units, Molas-Gallart differentiates four main types of transfers (see Table 1.1). This typology makes it possible to specify the most efficient mechanisms depending on the type of transfer studied. This approach has the advantage of highlighting the prominent role that certain actors or institutions can play, depending on the type of transfer (technology broker, scientific journals, mixed research laboratory, service provider, consulting and outsourcing, etc.).

Table 1.1. The four main types of transfer (source: Molas-Gallart 1997)

Mode	No adaptation	Adaptation
Actors
Transfer internal to a single unit	Internal straight transfer	Internal adaptational transfer
Transfer between two or more units	External straight transfer	External adaptational transfer

However, from a methodological perspective, this does not solve the question of recognizing technologies that can be the object of a dual transfer. Several identification methods are thus considered in various research works.

The most commonly used method employs case studies. In defense economics, the interest of this method is in bypassing the reliability problems of available data on technologies. Many case studies have been conducted on various sectors or on various technologies, such as machine-tools, civilian aeronautics, information technologies with semiconductors, data processing and the Internet, to name just a few (Mowery 2010); for a full summary see the prospective strategy study conducted by IRIS¹. These case studies show the diversity of situations and the dual transfer methods, but do not offer an overall view on the subject.

A further solution enabling the identification of a technology passing from the military sector to the civilian sector involves the study of the financing source and can be an identification solution. Indeed, it is at least possible to formulate the hypothesis that the research programs of a defense ministry a priori assign a military nature to innovations that could result from the program. It marks these technologies as military or at least dual. It is on this principle that certain analyses rely for the study of technology transfers from the public R&D to market sectors, and for stressing the influence of the military nature of the innovations on these transfers (Chakrabarti et al. 1993; Chakrabarti and Anyanwu 1993). It is however difficult to maintain a clear distinction: what falls within the defense budgetary perimeter varies from one country to another, depending on its history, on the size of its Defense Industrial and Technological Base (DITB), on its defense strategy choices, etc.

The actors can also play the role of technology markers. One technology developed by actors of the DITB would be qualified as defense technology, unlike others. This is, among others, one of the approaches chosen by Chinworth (2000a) to analyze duality in Japan. This method makes it possible to approach the question from a global perspective, but involves the risk of considering, in the analysis, technologies developed by manufacturers that are partly active in the civilian field, and hence not necessarily intended for defense purposes.

Finally, the most clear-cut approach is to consider that certain technologies are intrinsically associated with defense activity. This is, for example, the approach of Acosta et al. (2013, 2017), which assume that certain technological classes of the International Patent Classification (IPC) are by hypothesis technological classes in the defense field. Hence, studying the sectors of application of these technologies, which extend beyond the defense perimeter, these authors measure their level of duality. Methods can complement each other and thus contribute to refining the identification of technologies that are relevant for study (Chinworth 2000b).

The analysis of technologies, and notably that of the knowledge composing them, is an interesting approach. Indeed, beyond the technological object itself, technology can be defined through the set of knowledge it encompasses (Carlsson and Stankiewicz 1991). Duality is then related to knowledge dissemination between civilian and defense sectors. This reinforces the idea that it is difficult to a priori determine if a technology is dual or not (Mérindol 2005). Defense programs are knowledge-intensive projects, with varied sources and unpredictable final results. Consequently, knowledge duality may cause know-how transformation and generate opportunities, both for civilian manufacturers and for those active in the defense sector (Guillou et al. 2009).

From this perspective, the existence of either civilian or military prevalence in the duality process is more difficult to interpret than in the spin-off paradigm, as defined by Alic et al. (1992). In order to benefit from duality, “the whole challenge resides […] in the equilibrium between specialization and building a joint knowledge base by the actors” (Mérindol 2005, p. 52).

This analysis in terms of knowledge leads to two opposite conceptions:

 – the first would be to consider knowledge duality as a spillover, strictly speaking (a term that is more relevant than spin-off and spin-in in knowledge economics). Then duality would be the result of spillovers (knowledge transfers) between civilian and military fields, without premeditation on behalf of any of them. Duality is then perceived as a process of translation from one field of application to another. This view is finally quite close to that proposed by Chinworth (2000a) and Acosta et al. (2013, 2017);

 – the second involves the simple consideration of the presence of spillovers as a corollary of the absence of duality:Particular research is done exclusively in one domain and adapted more or less without change in others. The existence of spillovers, therefore, is not evidence of duality, and might in fact be evidence of its absence. Thus, promotion of spillovers can be viewed as a policy designed to correct the ‘duality’ failure of a program of R&D. (Cowan and Foray 1995, p. 852)

According to this perspective, duality resides in the joint civilian–military design of knowledge. In this case, duality is an input data of technological change; it involves an evolution, if not identical, at least compatible with the technical characteristics of civilian and military applications.

This being said, a certain number of works have been conducted which indicate that the border between the two sectors is highly porous to knowledge. Three key stages in the research enable the progress toward a method for systematic knowledge analysis in duality. The first stage is that of studies conducted at the company level, according to which the sources of knowledge employed by defense companies are both defense and civilian companies (Chakrabarti et al. 1993). The second is that of studies at the technology level, which try to track all the links between knowledge produced in the defense field and that produced in the military field (Acosta et al. 2011, 2013, 2017). They pay particular attention to spillovers, as is the case for Japan, in the work of Chinworth (2000a). Finally, one article proposes to lay the bases for a systematic study of knowledge by means of patents. This study does not rely on a view of knowledge duality in terms of spillovers, but in terms of similarity in knowledge production, otherwise put, a cognitive proximity between the civilian field and the defense field. In that respect, it is in agreement with case studies that try to identify similarities and differences between civilian research and defense research in various technological domains (Lapierre 2001). Hence, this analysis is close to the above-mentioned second perspective, according to which, instead of being characterized by transfers, duality is characterized by a potential joint production of knowledge and it advances a shared foundation used by both parts (Meunier and Zyla 2016).

In addition to knowledge composing defense technologies, the complexity of these systems contributes to obscuring the link between civilian innovation and defense innovation. During World War II and in the decades after it, arms programs grew in complexity. The hydrogen bomb, fighter jets and ballistic missiles are examples that prove this dynamics. In order to develop these complex technologies, those who designed these programs needed to develop new system engineering knowledge for a better integration of these technologies in a homogeneous system (Sapolsky 2003).

Defense systems lost none of their complexity. They combine many components that are hierarchically organized to produce an integrated operational system. They are often referred to as Complex Product Systems (CoPS) (Prencipe 1997; Hobday et al. 2000, 2005) because of the significant number of components, knowledge depth and competences to be implemented, as well as the production of new knowledge required by their development (Hobday 1998).

In the face of this complexity, two types of knowledge can be distinguished: one related to system architecture and the other to components (Henderson and Clark 1990). This distinction is essential when studying duality (Mérindol 2010). Indeed, while complex systems emerged in the military field, they then spread to civilian sectors, driving the development of competences in the field of system integration. From then, it was possible for the civilian and military sectors to share knowledge on the technological components as well as system engineering. Consequently, the observation of duality became even more difficult and subtle.

Nevertheless, this way of assessing whether duality between two knowledge systems is related to one of the knowledge components shared by two systems, or to two systems relying on the same knowledge architecture, is not trivial. On this subject, contemporary literature points out that the specificity of knowledge in the defense field is more often at the system architecture level than at the component level (Lazaric et al. 2011). In other terms, defense systems combine technologies that, taken individually, are used by both defense and civilian sectors, but associate them in an original manner.

This distribution of knowledge between defense and civilian sectors obviously evolves depending on the various technical systems developed and on the innovations they generate. A proper understanding of duality requires the consideration of temporal dynamics. Duality should be considered at the very beginning of a product life, namely during the research phase, and should obviously stop during the development phase (Gagnepain 2001).

Given that duality is not a constant phenomenon, then the period, phase and moment during which it is manifest should be identified. Alic et al. (1992) offer a first macrolevel approach of this dynamics explaining, for semiconductors, the reversal of the direction of spin-offs between the civilian and military sectors by the domination of military demand in the 1980s and, afterwards, by a domination of civilian demand. This made the military sector dependent on civilian innovation, as it is the latter that mainly directs R&D efforts in this field.

In the 1990s, Foray (1990) and Chesnais (1993) noted a transformation in the relation between civilian R&D and military R&D. Foray highlighted the weakening of the role of military R&D in the increase of industrial productivity and pointed out the following two factors:

 – the distortion of the scientific and technical system related to the technical specificities of the military material. As such, they highlighted the operational nature of R&D programs financed by defense, which favors the development expenditure as well as a strong product instead of process orientation of these programs;

 – the end of the four types of spin-offs identified by Mowery and Rosenberg (1991): direct effects (commercial application of technologies directly issued from defense), second-order effects (only one part of technology is embedded, either in a material form or as knowledge), effects related to research (reflected in knowledge dissemination) and organizational effects (for example, through a community of researchers); these disappear with the end of the generic nature of technologies.

Based on this observation, Foray recommends two organizational transformations: on the one hand, organizing the increasing dependence of military technology on civilian R&D and, on the other hand, promoting the idea of defense financing for civilian programs, as a guarantee for their development. In the particular case of France, the upstream study programs are presented as one of the means of “insertion of defense R&D policies in global technological policies” (Foray and Guichard 2001). It is the interaction of these programs with the other devices that should be considered, in view of its role as an instrument of duality.

Besides these long-term dynamics, a microanalysis facilitates the understanding of short-term dynamics. From an evolutionary perspective, the dual potential of a technology varies in time, and also depends on the type of R&D program (Cowan and Foray 1995).

First, the time variation: the notion of a technology lifecycle (Utterback and Abernathy 1975; Abernathy 1978) highlights two phases (experimentation then standardization) during which the dual potential evolves. The experimentation phase has the highest potential, while standardization brings down dual potential. Indeed, during the experimentation phase, potential applications of technology are not yet clearly identified, and therefore they may appear interesting to both civilians and militaries. But jointly conducted research may speed up the timetable; this means that actors in the defense sector and those in the civilian sector conduct tests together and thus accelerate the technology maturing process. They can also save time in terms of the “event”, by conducting a higher number of tests before the standardization phase. Thus they reach a higher level of technology maturity within the same lapse of time (Cowan and Foray 1997).

During the standardization phase, the application domains require specific adaptation to the defense case or to the civilian case (norms, regulations, etc.). Each application caries on developments that lead to technological trajectories diverging between the two domains, and reduce the number of potential collaborations.

Then, things depend on the type of project: once more, according to Cowan and Foray, the potential of a product-oriented project is not the same and does not evolve at the same pace as the potential of a process-oriented project. A product-oriented project has a lower dual potential, as it is limited by demands specific to the application domain. Moreover, the standardization phase strongly reduces this potential even further. A process-oriented project is, on the other hand, less limited by the civilian or military specificities and the standardization phase can be at least in part jointly conducted, leading to civilian and military convergence on the implementation of the technology.

In this approach, duality is perceived as a mechanism for the joint production of technology. Organizing R&D according to duality principles would then enable a larger number of potential applications, the delay of standardization-related technology lock-in and consequent preservation of technology variety.

On the other hand, other research according to the technology lifecycle has proved that defense may show renewed interest in technologies after their standardization in the civilian sector, and thus revive their dual potential (Sachwald 1999). Duality is perceived here as a spin-in getting close to the off-the-shelf purchase practice within a cost reduction policy.

A last note on temporality is worth making in relation to the life time of a defense program, and particularly to its maintenance in operational conditions (MOC). This characteristic of defense programs increases the complexity of the civilian–defense relation. Indeed, even if, as underlined by Droff (2013), in MOC duality facilitates the proximity between civilian and military activities, the fact remains that, due to regulatory and operational constraints of military MOC, manufacturers have to maintain competences and technologies for a very long time after their development. In these types of activities, duality is related to transfers or to the provision of equipment adequate for a given territory.

Figure 1.1. Technology cycle and dual potential. (a) Product-oriented; (b) process-oriented (source: Cowan and Foray 1995, p. 858)

Given these considerations on the temporal dimension, a priori knowledge on the applications of a technology in the future seems unlikely, as the majority of them have multiple uses (Sachwald 1999). In addition to temporality, some consider that future applications of a technology depend in particular on the social network in which it is developed or used (Cowan and Foray 1995; Kulve and Smit 2003). In innovation sociology, the notion of collaboration between network actors is essential for the economic dynamics. The concepts of techno-economic networks (Callon 1991) or sociotechnical networks (STN) (Elzen et al. 1996) point out this aspect; they are also the source of inspiration for the approaches of duality that place the collaborations between actors at the core of the analysis (Kulve and Smit 2003). Their main contribution is that the study of duality is no longer focused on technologies, but on the networks in which they emerge. The characteristics of these networks are susceptible to facilitating dual development. The idea of a temporality in the dual potential, as advanced by Cowan and Foray, is preserved, together with the idea of transfer mechanisms specific to each situation.

This approach inspires the most recent works on duality and the innovation system perspective is nowadays often preferred for the integration of these network effects in the analysis (Guichard 2004a; Guichard and Heisbourg 2004; Mérindol 2004; Serfati 2008; Bellais 2014). The system set-up, animation and organization are presented in this context as essential challenges of dual technological innovation.

The approaches in terms of innovation system do not fit the “outdated perspective of technical change that is taking place quasi-autonomously from the rest of economy” (Amable 2003). In defense economics, it is the multidimensional nature of this approach that renders it particularly interesting for addressing matters of organization, governance or strategy of duality.