Asked how emerging technology gets from labs to the military, Mitha describes a Defense Department effort to license unused lab patents to companies at no cost for evaluation. He says the department is also funding early work on them.
…seeing how they can develop their own industrial base. So there's a lot to be done there. And some of the presentations in the technical session, really, we're talking about specific capabilities and how those could be also scaled or shared or can help facilitate the process a little bit easier.
…those linkages, the emerging technologies just sit in the labs and they spin around and don't do anything. So tell me about those conversations that you're having with military, either the United States or allies and partners about what are the best ways to operationalize that emerging tech.
I think the most important thing that everyone that I've talked to is either trying to figure out or they're a part of it is how do we commercialize technologies. And one example that the department is working on now is this Defense Patent Holiday Initiative, where they're taking patents that are sitting on the shelf at times at labs that have been developed by scientists that work for the department. But how do we commercialize those capabilities? How do we put them in the hands of industry? So the department right now is offering no-cost commercial evaluation licenses to these companies to take these patents and to do something with them. So we can continue to advance the technologies and bring more emerging technologies to the forefront to support the warfighters, whether it's advanced…
That's such an interesting concept. I've never really thought about it. I guess I wasn't aware of this program. So the department is saying, hey, at all of our labs, we have done all this incredible research, government scientists, and we have patents on really cool stuff, but nothing's ever been…
sometimes it's too hard. It's too hard to license the patent. So how does the government make that easier? And then how can we use, or how can the government use emerging technologies like AI to actually help industry figure out, like, and the government figure out what's important, what do we care…
So if I was an emerging tech company that had some specialty but also had some room to look at other technology that other people had developed, how would I start thinking about entering into this space?