Spin-in is the reverse of spin-off: technology developed for the commercial market, adopted for military use. It used to be the exception. It is now the rule — not a supplement to spin-off, but the replacement for it
Look at where the leading edge actually sits. Machine learning. Sensing. Autonomy. Batteries. Space launch and manufacturing. Every one of those is dominated by commercial companies, funded by commercial investors, improving on commercial schedules. No defence department on earth is out in front of it.
The most consequential battlefield innovations of the past three years didn’t come out of national laboratories. They came from small workshops assembling uncrewed aircraft out of parts anyone can order, from commercial satellite imagery, from off-the-shelf communications terminals, from software shipped in weeks.
Canada’s clearest example runs both ways at once. RADARSAT watches ice, floods, crops and shorelines for civilian agencies, and it watches ships and the waters off our coasts for military ones. The same satellites. The same engineers. The same firm.
Nobody converts anything.
That’s what dual-use means now, and it’s worth being precise about it, because the old definition is still doing damage. It no longer describes a military product with a civilian spin-off, or a civilian product with a military bolt-on. It describes one capability with two sets of customers, and ideally no conversion step in between.
The conversion step is the part people miss. In the old model there was a translation event — something was declassified, licensed, adapted, released. In the new one, increasingly, there isn’t. The thing that serves the civilian customer is the thing that serves the military one, running on the same codebase, built by the same team, improved on the same release cycle.
What this means if you’re building something
Ask one question about your own roadmap: if a military user picked up what you shipped last quarter, how much of it would have to change?
If the answer is “quite a lot” — a different form factor, a separate build, a compliance rewrite before anyone can touch it — then you’re being asked to operate in the old model, and you should price that work honestly, because it’s a second product.
If the answer is “not much” — the same system, different users, different data, maybe a different deployment environment — then you’re already dual-use, whether or not you’ve ever described yourself that way. And that changes the economics considerably. It means a defence customer is a marginal customer on infrastructure you were building anyway, rather than a bet-the-company pivot into a market with one buyer.
Most Canadian founders I talk to are in the second category and assume they’re in the first. That assumption is expensive. It keeps people out of a market they’re already qualified for, and it’s the reason the next post is about how much wider this category is than almost anyone thinks.
Next: the aperture is wider than you think.
This is drawn from my essay “The Dual-Use Dimension,” published in 2067 Journal. [Read the full piece →]
