Nine posts of diagnosis. Here’s what’s missing, and it’s two different things.
The first is a place to meet. Right now there are only a few doors into a large public institution: the job competition, the security clearance, and above all the request for proposal — the document a government publishes listing what it wants and how bids will be scored, with the scoring fixed before the first bid arrives.
Every one of those doors filters for the same quality: whether a thing can be described in advance and matched to a template that already exists. Which means an RFP can only buy a solution the institution already knows how to specify. If the best available answer reframes the question — you asked for a better sensor, but what you need is to stop needing the sensor — there’s no box on the form. That proposal isn’t rejected on its merits. It never becomes submittable.
Our usual response is to add a program. In 2018 the federal government counted ninety-two business innovation program streams across twenty departments and announced it would cut them by up to two-thirds. Each was created by people fixing a real gap. Each is another door, built to the same specification as the doors already there.
Ninety-two doors into the same room is not access. It’s a maze with excellent intentions.
What’s needed is a different surface — call it a bench. Concretely, six things: a buying process that doesn’t outlast the company trying to win it; clearances that move at the speed of the work rather than the speed of the queue; a path that doesn’t force a company to choose between its civilian market and its military one; neutral ground where everyone can meet without defending the institution behind them; money shaped like a ten-year hardware company rather than a software startup; and enough published accountability that people will use the thing twice.
The second missing thing is harder, and it’s the one I’d put money on being decisive.
A table where things can be set down is useless if nobody around it will pick anything up. Call that willingness absorptive capacity: the ability to accept a solution you didn’t build, in a form you wouldn’t have chosen, from someone you don’t yet fully understand.
Every one of the five groups is short of it. The soldier being asked to field something imperfect. The public servant being asked to exercise discretion rather than document its absence. The investor being asked to fund a category the spreadsheet rejects. The accelerator being asked to learn a language it doesn’t speak. The prime being asked to open the moat.
What this means if you’re building something
None of this is exotic and none of it is glamorous. It comes down to whether a procurement officer publishes a problem instead of a specification. Whether an investor writes a first cheque into a company whose only customer is the government. Whether an officer fields something at eighty percent and improves it in service. Whether an accelerator learns enough of the military problem to recognise the defence application in something built for another market.
Small moves, from ordinary chairs.
That last one is our job, and it’s why this series exists.
This is the last post in the series. The full argument is in “The Dual-Use Dimension,” in 2067 Journal.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
