Gene Keselman and Fiona Murray
The term “dual-use” is something of a lightning rod in the startup world, sparking debates about its meaning and usefulness. In these virtual pages, Jake Chapman wrote that “reliance on dual-use technology is a trap,” arguing that timing issues, intellectual property controls, and commercial interests undermine the essential prioritization of defense needs. Others have worried that categorizing projects as dual-use excludes them from a range of funding sources or banking services. Some founders have even discovered that if they are categorized as having dual-use technology, they are assumed to be working in conflict with environmental, social, and governance guidelines. These barriers stymie our ability to invest in and build solutions for our collective security.
Our experience from MIT, working with startups across a range of critical technologies exploring defense and commercial civilian markets, is to define dual-use as a strategy, not a category. The technologies that can serve both military and civilian purposes are so wide that as a category, dual-use has a diminishing meaning. In reality, early stage founders build a capability and, as good entrepreneurs, consider the best market fit across commercial and military markets as necessary and with a clear focus. In other words, dual-use is a market strategy that might be deployed defense-first, commercial-first, or both (when economically effective due to scale constraints in some niche defense markets). This is not a cop-out. To assume up front which strategy an entrepreneur might take is to remove their agency and expertise and the fundamentally exploratory nature of venture building.
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