Mirjam Ros
Director
Mirjam combines more than 25 years of experience in commercial, legal, and strategic leadership roles at organizations such as Airbus Netherlands, (GKN) Fokker, and TNO with her current work at nlmtd as a business coach, speaker, and advisor. She helps teams, companies, and governments design innovation partnerships that truly work: complementary, future-proof, and impactful.
Designer of the visuals in this paper
Iris ten Have
Visual Designer and Consultant
Iris is a creative all-rounder, always with a marker in her hand. Her curiosity drives her to truly understand challenges, context, and underlying problems. From those insights, she combines strategic thinking with visual working to help organizations accelerate change and get people moving.
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Europe’s security, sovereignty, and industrial resilience depend on faster, smarter innovation. The question is no longer why, but how?
The war in Ukraine, geopolitical tensions, and global supply chain vulnerabilities have exposed a hard truth: Europe cannot afford to rely on others for its defence capability or aerospace readiness.
But speeding up innovation in these sectors is not just about technology; it’s about transforming how we collaborate, procure, and scale.
Start-ups, corporates, governments, investors, and technology institutes and regulators each hold a piece of the puzzle. Yet, fragmented approaches, rigid contracts, and misaligned incentives often hold back progress. Breakthrough technologies demand breakthrough ways of collaborating, contracting, and scaling. We must update the way innovation is sourced, supported, and scaled across the ecosystem.
At the nlmtd Aerospace & Defence Round Table, held during TNW Conference 2025, innovators from across the ecosystem came together to tackle a single question:
How can we accelerate innovation in a domain where security, speed, and scale must go hand in hand?
This paper shares seven key insights that emerged: practical takeaways for anyone looking to unlock faster, smarter, and more resilient innovation in the aerospace and defence ecosystem.
1. Fund early-stage product development
Product development in aerospace and defence is costly and high-risk. Many promising innovations get stuck between a great idea and a deployable product. Many begin in the civil sector and must be re-engineered to meet strict defence or aerospace requirements—adding layers of testing, certification, and engineering complexity. This typically occurs between Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) 4 and 7, where prototypes are validated and demonstrated in relevant or operational environments.
At the same time, manufacturing feasibility must be proven, this is often overlooked in early stages. This is where Manufacturing Readiness Levels (MRL) 4 to 7 becomes critical, assessing factors like production repeatability, tooling, and supply chain readiness. For start-ups and dual-use innovators, this means high costs and risk without guaranteed demand.
Many innovations stall in this “valley of death” between technical validation and real-world deployment. That’s why early-stage funding, risk-sharing mechanisms, and clear order commitments from defence end-users are essential. When governments act as launching customers, they give innovators and investors the confidence to continue, bridging the gap between a promising prototype and a deployable, scalable product.
“Innovation is a system-level challenge. Winning requires aligning the entire ecosystem, not just excelling at your piece.”
2. Trust and collaboration matter
Technology alone doesn’t drive innovation – new ways of collaboration and building mutual trust can make the difference. Initiating collaborative innovation projects and building relationships between startups, corporates, investors, and governments within the wider ecosystem is crucial. A lack of trust often leads to defensive IP strategies, overly complex contracts, and stalling partnerships. Step-by-step approaches to building trusted partnerships are needed, starting with simple, modular and transparent agreements that reflect mutual interest and context.
Clear, plain-language contracts of just a few pages, including simple and fair IP-clauses can help ease legal complexity and increase participation. This encourages co-creation, reduces friction, and can unlock real momentum and accelerate progress across both sectors.
3. Dual-use and culture shift: two sides of the same coin
Corporates must adapt their innovation culture to align with the speed and mindset of startups. That means embracing rapid iteration, accepting failure, and sharing risk. This shift is key to unlocking cross-sector innovation, where dual-use technologies can flow more easily between civil aerospace applications and defence operations. Importantly, dual use is not just a pathway for scale; it’s a necessity for continuity. Defence contracts often involve long timelines and uncertain demand. Solutions may be procured years ahead of use or never deployed at all. To maintain a healthy, sustainable business for the start-ups and to guarantee deliveries for the government, companies must be able to serve more than one market. By adapting internal processes, such as shorter decision cycles, flexible pilots, open experimentation, corporates can become magnets for startup collaboration, diversify their revenue streams, and strengthen their long-term innovation capacity.
4. Government direction and capability-driven challenges
The aerospace and defence sectors thrive when there is clear strategic direction from government. Visionary leadership is essential. Not only to define long-term priorities, but to formulate missions and capability challenges at the ecosystem level. When governments openly communicate their operational needs and strategic focus areas, it helps align innovation funding, research efforts, and procurement pipelines. This provides much-needed clarity for start-ups, corporates, and investors, and enables better coordination across the ecosystem.
“Public innovation is not just about fixing markets; it’s about actively shaping and creating them.”
Framing challenges in functional terms, rather than prescribing technical solutions, creates the space for a broader range of players to contribute, including non-traditional suppliers and dual-use innovators.
5. Innovation-oriented procurement & contracting
To support this shift and accelerate meaningful and more outcome-driven innovation, procurement must shift from a compliance exercise to a strategic enabler. This means moving away from overly prescriptive technical specs, like defining the exact drone model or camera type and instead specifying functional outcomes, such as: “Monitor a 10km border zone for six hours in low-light conditions.” This capability-driven approach allows for greater flexibility and opens the door to non-traditional suppliers, including start-ups and dual-use innovators, to propose smarter, more agile, or cost-effective solutions.
Strategic procurement decisions must be grounded in accurate market insights and built on genuine and flexible partnerships with industry. Furthermore, it is crucial that procurement supports the innovation project team in selecting the most suitable innovation-oriented procurement instrument. Based on context, stakeholder interests, and long-term goals to enable phased contracting, iterative prototyping, and adaptive scaling. This helps de-risk early-stage innovation while ensuring alignment with operational needs and strategic objectives.
Unlocking innovation also requires smart contracting tailored to the specific needs of innovation-oriented procurement and partnering. That includes using clear, fair, and business-savvy IP agreements that are tailored to the context, contributions, and long-term goals of each partner. When handled well, IP becomes a lever for trust and growth—not a barrier. Contracts must reflect the realities of both start-ups and established players, with flexibility to support future scale-up, commercialisation, and dual-use exploitation.
When procurement is approached strategically, integrating capability needs, ecosystem alignment, and risk-sharing frameworks, it becomes a powerful lever for innovation. It enables defenceorganisations to adopt emerging technologies faster, build resilience into their supply chains, and foster a more open, competitive, and future-ready ecosystem.
6. Simplify and align international collaboration
Innovation doesn’t stop at the borders of organizations or countries. Simplifying international collaboration is essential to scale promising technologies faster. Streamlined export procedures, shared certification standards, and cross-border innovation funding mechanisms can help. For urgent operational needs or current supply chain dependencies, working in parallel with close allies offers a practical path forward. Especially when switching suppliers now is not an option. Coordinated efforts across member states, particularly in joint tech development and procurement strategy, will be key to building resilient and scalable innovation pipelines.
7. Orchestrate the innovation ecosystem
To succeed, innovation must be orchestrated, not just funded or sourced. This means actively aligning actors across the ecosystem: governments, startups, large industry players, research institutes, certification bodies, and investors. Ecosystem orchestration helps ensure the right technologies get the right support at the right time.
It connects early-stage innovators with production capacity, links certification challenges to testing facilities, and builds shared roadmaps for dual-use development. This approach creates long-term strategic value and helps scale innovations beyond one-off pilots.
Conclusion
Accelerating innovation in the aerospace and defence sectors requires more than breakthrough technologies. It requires a shift in how we work together and demands a trusted, well-orchestrated ecosystem, built on early and targeted funding, new collaboration models, a culture of trust, clear government direction, innovation-oriented procurement, simple and fair contracting, and strong cross-border collaboration. If we get that right, we can deliver the solutions needed for Europe’s strategic autonomy and industrial resilience to stay secure, sovereign and future ready.
Connecting ideas to action
At nlmtd, we help organisations in the aerospace and defence sectors turn ambition into execution. From innovation roadmaps and strategic partnerships to smart procurement strategies including balanced IP agreements and ecosystem orchestration, we’ve supported governments, start-ups, corporates and clusters across Europe in building the future of secure, scalable innovation.
If you’d like to learn more about our approach or explore successful client cases, feel free to reach out. We’re always open to exchange ideas, explore partnerships, or see how we can support your innovation journey.
Together we catalyse the innovation Europe needs.
