"Step one, effective immediately, is to make roughly 400 carefully picked patents available online for a free two-year trial period. Specifically, any company that wants to try out one of the 400 technologies in its own research, development, and products can get what's called a Commercial Evaluation License (CEL) without the usual fee. Those 400 technologies- everything from a Navy-developed drone tracking system to novel Army mortar fuses - were chosen out of the thousands of possibilities by Michael's staff."
"WASHINGTON - The Pentagon spends $3.3 billion a year on its 216 laboratories, which have piled up thousands of paten ts, often for technologies which may never see the light of day, let alone a battlefield. But this morning, the Department's CTO, Under Secretary for Research & Engineering Emil Michael, publicly launched a two-pronged crusade to change that."
"[It's] a frustrating point: Why do these innovations - and we have thousands of them in the labs, billions of dollars worth of IP that's been created by the great minds in the labs - why does it not get all the way out there to the warfighter? In part, it's because you don't know where to go to find them. They're all over the place. They're not categorized, they're not available."
The Pentagon spends $3.3 billion annually on 216 laboratories that have accumulated thousands of patents, many never fielded. Department leadership launched a two-pronged effort to get lab innovations into commercial development and into warfighter use. The immediate measure makes roughly 400 selected patents available online under a two-year, royalty-free Commercial Evaluation License for companies to test and develop products. The selections map to six Critical Technology Areas and were filtered using AI. If companies want continued rights after the trial, negotiated licensing deals are possible. The program aims to improve discoverability and commercialization of defense R&D.
Read at Breaking Defense
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