Читать книгу Dual Innovation Systems - Francois-Xavier Meunier - Страница 6

Technical superiority is essential for successful military operations: “a small edge in performance can mean survival” (Alic et al. 1992). This is why the defense industry continues to propose increasingly high performance systems, and from the Manhattan Project to combat aircraft, passing through communication systems, it has significantly contributed to technical progress, especially after World War II.

Beyond the security aspect, contribution to technical progress is one of the arguments advanced by the industry to highlight the positive effect of arms expenditure. Indeed, due to tight budget constraints in developed countries and increasing costs of defense materials, the impact of defense on the overall economic performance of a country has come under scrutiny; the driving role played by defense technological innovation within national innovation systems seems to be an argument for maintaining this expenditure.

On the other hand, since the late 1980s, the technologically pioneering role attributed to the defense industry has been challenged; this marked the end of the spin-off paradigm (Alic et al. 1992). In pure economic terms, it was more difficult to justify military expenditure, and the relation between military and civilian domains appeared under a new light. Consequently, a long-term view was proposed of how military technological spin-offs to the civilian domain alternate with civilian technological absorptions in the military field (Dombrowski et al. 2002).

At this point, a duality emerged and captured the interest of the scientific community.The simplest definition of this concept is undoubtedly the one proposed by the French Ministry of Armed Forces, according to which it “must make possible military and civilian applications” (Ministre de la défense 2006). Nevertheless, this definition does not cover the full complexity of the concept of duality, which today retains several senses, none of which gathers consensus, both from academic and operational perspectives.

Upon its emergence in the 1980s, duality was presented (notably in the United States) as a means enabling civilian sectors to benefit from military Research and Development (R&D) expenditure (Quenzer 2001; Uzunidis and Bailly 2005). Duality is then to a certain extent an argument that goes against the existence of a crowding-out effect associated with defense expenditures compared to civilian expenditure in R&D.From then on, the relations between defense production and civilian production became a major field of analysis for defense economists, and duality a widely employed concept. It is the focus of many works (Gummett and Reppy 1988; Alic et al. 1992; Cowan and Foray 1995; Molas-Gallart 1997; Kulve and Smit 2003; Mérindol and Versailles 2010) and facilitates the understanding of connections between the Defense Industrial and Technological Base (DITB) and the rest of the economic sectors. The development of underlying principles of duality would be an opportunity to improve the economic and technological performance of military expenditure and justify its economic legitimacy. Indeed, by supporting the synergies between civilian and military innovation, duality is a means to reduce the cost of defense policy and improve the innovation capacity of a country.

Nevertheless, an opposing view on duality has progressively emerged and has taken a parallel development path. Its supporters perceive the rapprochement between defense innovation and civilian innovation as a risk of disseminating military technologies in general, and weaponry systems in particular (Alic 1994; Tucker 1994; Bonomo et al. 1998; Meier and Hunger 2014). According to this paradigm, on the one hand, duality weakens the capacities of States to control defense technology dissemination, making it easier for enemy or unallied powers to acquire it. On the other hand, military technologies are this way made available to non-State groups, which would then pose a new threat for the States. From this perspective, duality would lower the performance of military expenditure as a guarantee for peace and would pose a risk for global security and economic stability.

Besides these two macroeconomic approaches, there is a later microeconomic perspective on duality, which is seen as an opportunity for defense companies to diversify their activity. Although the aeronautics sector is a pioneer in this field, today almost no industrial sector involved in the military field is free from a dualization of the market, and duality is now key to the strategy of defense companies (Depeyre 2013; Mérindol and Versailles 2015a).

System integrators in particular are leading this rapprochement between civilian and defense fields (Prencipe 1997, 2000; Gholz 2002; Sapolsky 2003; Hobday et al. 2005; Lazaric et al. 2011). Given their specificity, they have to aggregate an increasing number of technologies that are not always exclusively owned by defense manufacturers (for example, semiconductors or telecommunications) and must be able to appropriate or “absorb” technologies that are nowadays not necessarily intended for military application. Conversely, while system integrator skills were originally developed within the defense industry, they are now widespread in many large civilian companies. Due to this competence, such manufacturers, particularly those with access to high technologies, can integrate in their production a broad technological spectrum, which partly originates in the military field. Therefore, due to technology transfers, companies in both defense and civilian sectors benefit from technical advances in various sectors.

From a broader perspective, this dualization can be interpreted as a rapprochement of civilian and military production systems (Guichard 2004a, 2004b; Guichard and Heisbourg 2004; Serfati 2005, 2008; Bellais and Guichard 2006). In 1995, the U.S. Congressional Office for Technological Assessment defined duality as a process through which the Defense Technology and Industrial Base (DTIB) and the broader Commercial Technology and Industrial Base (CTIB) merged into a single National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB) (US Congress 1990). In its most integrated sense, duality is then defined as an organization aimed at joint defense-civilian technological and industrial production. In the absence of a border between defense technology and civilian technology (if it never existed), the two sectors have an opportunity to cooperate in the research and development of technologies in order to take maximum advantage of overall competences and knowledge previously divided between two environments.

According to this approach, situations such as civilian material being used in a military context, off-the-shelf purchases by the Defense Ministry or, conversely, a technology initially intended for defense being appropriated by an industry, no longer fall under the umbrella of duality. The latter is only defined in terms of commonality, synergies and technological coherence between technological systems and “meso-sectors”, according to the approach proposed by Guichard (2004a, 2004b). The challenge is then to classify technologies in order to evaluate duality. If uses are no longer considered key factors for duality, then it is possible to reduce the bias of the analysis linked to fluctuations in the acquisition policies of Defense Ministries. Moreover, while uses are essential in assessing the criticality of a technology for defense operations, they provide no explanation for a potential technological transversality. How a technology is used gives no indication on its technological characteristics. In this case, an essential distinction lies at the basis of this analysis. The dual use of a technology (market-related duality) should be distinguished from dual innovation (production-related duality).

A second theme approached in addition to duality, and deriving from it, is that of technological innovation as such. When studying innovation, the definition proposed by the second edition of the Oslo Manual can be used, namely: “Technological product and process innovations (TPP) comprise implemented technologically new products and processes and significant technological improvements in products and processes. A TPP innovation has been implemented if it has been introduced on the market (product innovation) or used within a production process (process innovation)” (OECD 2005). By this definition, it is the very essence of innovation to provide companies with a competitive edge. This definition resumes the position supported by Porter (1985), who presents it as key to company competitiveness. Companies willing to maintain sustainable competiveness on a constantly evolving market must have innovation at the core of their strategies.

Moreover, companies are at the center of the innovation process: seizing technological opportunities is a first step that must be followed by protecting the advantage thus obtained, which is key to capitalizing on it (Teece 1986). A company can implement several protection regimes, with various performance levels in terms of degrees of appropriability (Dosi 1988). Six appropriation instruments are commonly identified (Levin et al. 1985): patents, secrecy, lead time, effects of the learning curve, duplication cost and time and the efforts involved in sales and high-quality services. While patents are acknowledged as an efficient product innovation appropriation mechanism, secrecy, lead time and the effects of the learning curve are considered as efficient for process innovation protection. The latter are nevertheless difficult, if not impossible, to understand, at least as far as secrecy, a very significant concept in defense industry, is concerned.

Technology draws particular attention from economists, who, among others, attempt to formulate a precise definition of this term. There are many approaches according to which technology – sometimes referred to as “technique” – is not considered as a simple artifact. It is obviously composed of one or several artifacts, but it may also include technical systems, knowledge, a social environment or uses (Pinch and Bijker 1984; MacKenzie 1993; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999; Bijker 2010; Bijker et al. 2012).

Knowledge plays an essential role in these approaches, similar to that described by Carlsson and Stankiewicz (1991), according to whom technology is a “flow of knowledge and competences”. Knowledge is the basis of technological systems and operates as a means to differentiate them. On this subject, the economists make a fundamental distinction between codified knowledge and tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1983). Codified knowledge is explicit, and can easily be the object of transactions through a medium (for example, a patent) which carries it. Tacit knowledge comprises know-how that is often associated with an individual or an organization, which renders commodification more difficult.

Even codified, technological knowledge is not transferred as simple information. There are costs involved in the acquisition of unformalized knowledge and organizational competences required for its use (Mansfield 1998). While the study of knowledge is instrumental to understanding technological systems structuring, the analysis is expected to capture, beyond its formal part, the informal aspects that are necessarily associated with it.

A rich economic literature explores the dissemination of knowledge and, following the above presentation, that of technology. Examining this literature in order to analyze dual technological innovation seems worthwhile. The majority of empirical studies on this subject involve patent data. These data related to knowledge flow identification are validated by a wide diversity of application fields. They were notably used to identify geographical transfers of knowledge (Jaffe et al. 1993; Autant-Bernard and Massard 2000; Autant-Bernard et al. 2014) and knowledge flows within research (Ham et al. 1998). Some used them to capitalize on innovation spin-offs (Trajtenberg 1990) or to study the role played by inventors in knowledge transfers (Jaffe 2000). Finally, many works utilizing patent quotations as analysis instruments examine knowledge or economic spin-offs from public research (Jaffe and Trajtenberg 1996; Henderson et al. 1998).

The analysis of technological dissemination between the defense sector and the civilian sector, either within the well-defined framework of duality or within the broader one of technology transfers, involves patent data only to a limited extent. When employed by defense economists, patent data are mainly used to describe the situation within the field itself (Gallié and Mérindol 2015). The works of Chinworth on duality in Japan (2000a, 2000b) are worth mentioning. Using a more thorough and regular approach, the works of d’Acosta et al. (2011, 2013, 2017) deal with duality, and more broadly with technological innovation in the field of defense, using patent data and an approach based on technological classes.

Less directly related to duality, other works using patent data take into account the defense theme in their analyses to show, for example, that technology transfers from public R&D to the market sectors are influenced by the defense character of innovations (Chakrabarti et al. 1993; Chakrabarti and Anyanwu 1993).

In this book, in order to study dual technological innovation through knowledge, two theoretical frameworks are employed. The first is the coherence framework. It was introduced in the 1990s by the works of Teece et al. (1994), who studied company diversification strategies. Coherence analyses originally dealt with the connection between production operations within a company. They were subsequently adapted and enhanced in order to assess the technological coherence of diversified companies (Piscitello 2005), industrial sectors (Krafft et al. 2011) and technological programs (Avadikyan and Cohendet 2005). These studies facilitate the understanding of how knowledge gets structured.

The second framework is the dominance framework. Economic dominance theory (EDT) is used to explore asymmetric relations between various entities interacting in a network. EDT originates in the works conducted by Perroux (1948) on the power between regions and nations in international exchanges. EDT employs a tool, namely influence graph theory (IGT; Lantner 1974), which identifies the dependences and interdependences between entities.

According to Lantner, IGT facilitates the assessment, within any structure that can be represented by a linear system, of the “global” influence that an entity A exerts on an entity B. But the study of this global influence requires consideration of what happens in the rest of the structure. The connections between A and C, D, etc., impact and amplify the direct influence on B (Lantner and Lebert 2015). In this study, IGT is applied to technological knowledge flows in order to better understand their dissemination between civilian and defense sectors.

Adopting a systemic approach, this work reconciles a global analysis framework centered on the concept of duality (Guichard and Heisbourg 2004; Mérindol 2004; Bellais and Guichard 2006; Serfati 2008) with an approach of technologies (Pinch and Bijker 1984; Carlsson and Stankiewicz 1991; Carlsson et al. 2002; Bijker 2010) facilitating the evaluation of their dual potential. The empirical work relies on the systematic analysis of knowledge production (Jaffe 1986; Jaffe and Trajtenberg 2002; Verspagen 2004; Hall et al. 2005) within large defense companies. It employs tools originating in the theory of technological coherence (Teece et al. 1994; Cohen 1997; Piscitello 2005; Krafft et al. 2011; Nasiriyar et al. 2013) and also those resulting from EDT (Perroux 1948, 1973, 1994; Defourny and Thorbecke 1984; Lantner 1972, 1974; Lantner and Lebert 2015; Lebert 2016; Lebert and Meunier 2017).

This leads to a reflection on the role that knowledge and its dissemination plays in dual potential measurement and the characterization of the modes of interaction between the civilian sector and the defense sector in an innovation process.

Endeavoring to understand the mechanisms for dual technological innovation dissemination, this works addresses three main challenges. The first challenge is to define dual technological innovation and propose an analysis framework for its study. To address this challenge, the first essential step is to understand that duality is a relatively fuzzy notion, taking on many characteristics depending on the interpretation (Cowanand Foray 1995; Kulve and Smit 2003; Guichard and Heisbourg 2004; Mérindol and Versailles 2015b). Defense manufacturers assimilate duality to a form of market diversification, while public powers perceive it as a means to relax a budget constraint (Gutman 2001) and at the same time take advantage of new innovation relays; these two examples show that duality is a multifaceted concept. In order to deal with its technological component, while keeping in mind this complexity, the proposed analysis framework relies on a precise meaning of the concept based on the principle of joint military–civilian technological production. In the context of this work, duality differs from technology transfers (Molas-Gallart 1997), and the proximities between civilian and military sectors in technological production play an essential role in dual innovation structuring (Guichard 2004b; Fiott 2014).

The second challenge relates to methodology. It involves designing a set of tools aimed at evaluating the dual potential of technologies. According to the above-mentioned analysis framework, this requires the determination of the joint military–civilian technological production potential. Traditionally, economics defines a technology based on the knowledge it comprises (Carlsson and Stankiewicz 1991). It is to this knowledge, either considered as individual units or as an articulated set, that a technology owes its characteristics. Therefore, the study of knowledge production in civilian and defense sectors makes it possible to measure their capacities to jointly produce technologies that, if not identical, are at least compatible. Moreover, a knowledge-based assessment of this matter has the advantage that it avoids a priori judgment on the potential use of technologies,thus enabling an approach that is both independent from and complementary to that of the expert. It is consequently possible to define a set of tools that measure the dual potential of any technology employing original theoretical frameworks in duality analysis, namely the theory of technological coherence (Teece et al. 1994; Piscitello 2005) and EDT.

The last challenge is to understand the influence of duality on knowledge production. This leads to a repositioning of dual technological innovation in its global environment. Indeed, besides measuring the dual potential of a technology, the challenge is in this case to better understand the roles played by the defense sector, on the one hand, and by the civilian sector, on the other hand, in structuring dual innovation-related knowledge. In fact, designing a technology does not rely only on the production of its internal knowledge, but also on the production of external knowledge. According to Fleming and Sorenson (2001), knowledge production is correlational. Therefore, studying how dual innovation-related knowledge is structured requires an analysis of the knowledge specific to the respective innovation. Furthermore, knowledge that may be useful either upstream of technological development or downstream of knowledge dissemination should be considered. Hence, the definition of the technological environment in which a dual innovation emerges facilitates the understanding of complementarities between civilian and defense sectors, and the description of dual potential depending on the interactions between the studied technology and its technological environment.

Consequently, the added value of this study is threefold: first, a duality analysis framework rooted in the principles of industrial economics and innovation economics, because of which duality is no longer considered a defense particularism; second, a set of tools that make possible, in addition to the traditional case studies, the measurement of the dual potential of various knowledge systems and their comparison; finally, an analysis of the dual potential of knowledge systems that are representative of the innovation activity of the world’s largest innovative companies in the field of defense between 2010 and 2012.