Innovations & technologies

BAE Systems Invents A Radically Different Way Of Speeding Defense Innovation

In the 30 years since the Cold War ended, the United States has lost much of the competitive edge it once enjoyed over countries like Russia and China in military technology. Although commercial innovation in the U.S. is progressing rapidly on many fronts, the Department of Defense has been slow to assimilate new ideas and turn them into usable tools for warfighters.

The lagging adoption of cutting-edge technologies has created a sense of crisis in Washington, where national strategy increasingly is focused on the danger posed by near-peer adversaries, especially China. Now, one of the nation’s biggest military contractors has fashioned a way of bypassing the traditional military innovation system, creating a vehicle for greatly accelerating the transition of new technology from laboratories to advanced development.

BAE Systems, Inc., the U.S. arm of Britain’s biggest aerospace and defense conglomerate, has created an organization within its Electronic Systems unit called FAST Labs that combines funding from federal research centers with venture capital and commercial technology incubators to greatly accelerate the velocity of innovation. Rather than being owned by the company’s operating units, FAST Labs is an independent profit and loss business within the enterprise dedicated solely to rapid innovation.