From Innovation to Capability: How Europe Is Trying to Shorten the Defence Innovation Cycle
Updated: 1 day ago
Europe does not have a shortage of defence innovation initiatives.
There are research programmes, accelerators, challenge competitions, venture funds, testing facilities and hundreds of companies developing technologies for military use.
The harder problem begins afterwards.
How does a promising technology move from a prototype into something that armed forces can actually test, validate, procure and deploy?
This gap between innovation and operational adoption has become one of the central problems of European defence innovation policy.
The Hub for EU Defence Innovation (HEDI) is one of the mechanisms designed to address it.
Created within the European Defence Agency (EDA) in 2022, HEDI has now evolved into HEDI 2.0, with a much stronger focus on connecting emerging technologies to actual military requirements, operational experimentation and capability adoption.
Overview
What HEDI is
The Hub for EU Defence Innovation was established in May 2022 following the EU Strategic Compass.
It is hosted by the European Defence Agency and acts as a focal point for defence innovation cooperation between Member States, industry, research organisations and other innovation actors.
Its objective is relatively simple to describe:
shorten the distance between an innovative idea and a usable military capability.
That places HEDI in a different position from a traditional research funding programme.
It is not primarily designed to finance long collaborative R&D projects.
Instead, it connects several stages of the innovation process:
technology identification;
development;
interaction with military users;
experimentation;
validation;
and ultimately adoption.
The official HEDI platform describes its objective as moving promising technologies more quickly from research towards deployment while connecting innovation directly to military needs.
Why HEDI 2.0 was created
The first version of HEDI helped bring together defence innovation activities across Europe.
But experience exposed a familiar problem.
Europe could generate ideas.
It could fund research.
It could create demonstrators.
What was less consistent was the transition from those activities into operational use.
This is sometimes described as the defence innovation “valley of death”: technologies reach a relatively mature stage but fail to move into real military programmes.
There are many possible reasons.
A technology may not be linked closely enough to an actual military requirement.
The end-user may become involved too late.
Testing may take place in laboratory conditions but not under realistic operational constraints.
Integration with existing military systems may prove more difficult than expected.
Procurement processes may not be designed for rapidly evolving technology.
Or there may simply be no clear organisation responsible for taking the technology into the next phase.
HEDI 2.0 represents an attempt to make that transition more structured.
EDA describes it as a pan-European platform for cooperative design, experimentation and capability development, with particular attention to faster transition from research to deployment, operational testing and fit-for-purpose procurement approaches.
How HEDI 2.0 works
The new HEDI structure is built around four interconnected services.
HEDI Element | Purpose | How It Works | Key Focus / Activities | Value for Companies |
Defence Frontier Insights (DFI) | Identify technologies before they become obvious defence capabilities. | Monitors both defence and civilian technology developments to identify emerging technologies, companies and trends that may affect future military capabilities. | AI; robotics; autonomy; communications; advanced materials; quantum technologies; other emerging dual-use technologies. | Helps identify technologies outside the traditional defence industry that could create military advantage. Insights can influence research priorities, funding decisions and capability development. |
Innovators Forge | Connect promising technologies with concrete military challenges. | Moves selected solutions through a phase-based process and connects innovators with EDA expert groups and Member States. | Idea; development; validation; increasingly realistic testing; military-user interaction. | Brings the military customer closer to technology development before the product is finished, allowing solutions to evolve around actual capability needs. |
Uptake of Innovation | Demonstrate whether technologies work in realistic military environments and support their transition towards adoption. | Uses operational experimentation to test technologies beyond presentations and controlled demonstrations. | Performance limitations; integration issues; operational constraints; interoperability; required modifications; deployment models. | Provides evidence of operational relevance and helps identify what must change before deployment. EDA also links this stage with more flexible procurement approaches intended to support faster uptake. |
Ecosystem Connections | Connect existing European defence innovation initiatives rather than create another isolated programme. | Coordinates activity across national and EU-level defence innovation ecosystems. | National initiatives; EU initiatives; innovation organisations;military stakeholders; technology ecosystems. | Helps reduce fragmentation and creates stronger connections between innovators, defence organisations and existing European initiatives. |
HEDI therefore also connects national defence innovation organisations, EU initiatives and other stakeholders through mechanisms such as the European Defence Innovation Network (EDIN) and the European Defence Innovation Days (EDID).
It also coordinates with the European Commission and NATO innovation initiatives.
From technology scouting to capability
Taken together, these elements create a simple conceptual pipeline:
identify → develop → experiment → validate → adopt
This is more important than it may initially appear.
European defence programmes have traditionally been very effective at structuring research collaboration.
But research success does not automatically create military capability.
A technology has to move through several additional filters:
Is there a genuine operational requirement?
Does it work outside laboratory conditions?
Can soldiers operate it?
Can it integrate with existing systems?
Can it survive military environments?
Only after these questions are answered does technological innovation begin to become defence capability.
HEDI 2.0 effectively tries to move these questions earlier into the innovation process.
Operational Experimentation
The clearest example of this approach is Operational Experimentation - OPEX.
OPEX campaigns bring technologies into realistic military environments and allow companies, military users and technical experts to work with them directly.
The first full-scale campaign was launched in 2025.
Its focus was autonomous systems for cross-domain military logistics.
Instead of testing individual technologies in isolation, the campaign examined how unmanned aerial and ground systems could perform logistics tasks under battlefield-like conditions.
That distinction matters.
A drone may perform perfectly during a technical demonstration.
A military logistics capability must work as part of a larger process.
It needs to interact with operators, other vehicles, communications systems, logistics procedures and operational command structures.
Operational experimentation therefore tests more than the product.
It tests the use of the product inside a military system.
What changes in 2026
OPEX was not designed as a one-off experiment.
The next campaign moves to Portugal in 2026.
According to EDA, the programme is moving from a proof-of-concept phase towards a broader multinational experimentation network.
The objective remains the same: shorten the transition from demonstration to adoption across European armed forces.
This matters strategically.
If OPEX becomes a recurring European mechanism rather than an individual campaign, it could create something that Europe has traditionally lacked: a common environment where Member States can evaluate emerging technologies together before individual national procurement decisions are made.
That could produce several benefits:
shared evidence;
common testing methodology;
greater interoperability;
lower technology risk;
and potentially stronger foundations for joint procurement.
HEDI, EUDIS and EDF
HEDI is easier to understand when placed next to two other important EU defence innovation mechanisms.
EDF | EUDIS | HEDI |
The European Defence Fund primarily finances collaborative defence research and development. Companies form multinational consortia and develop technologies against priorities defined in annual work programmes. EDF is therefore primarily a funding mechanism for collaborative R&D. | The EU Defence Innovation Scheme (EUDIS) operates within the EDF framework and focuses particularly on innovative companies, including SMEs, start-ups and non-traditional defence actors. Its tools include accelerators, hackathons, challenge competitions, testing support, matchmaking and funding mechanisms. | HEDI sits within the European Defence Agency.Its role is closer to the capability and military-user side of innovation. Its advantage is EDA’s direct relationship with national defence ministries, capability planners and military communities. |
The boundaries are not absolute, and the programmes increasingly cooperate.
HEDI explicitly works with EUDIS and NATO initiatives to reduce duplication and create synergies across the European defence innovation landscape.
What this means for companies
For defence and dual-use companies, HEDI represents a different type of opportunity from a normal grant call.
The value is not necessarily a large R&D budget.
The value may be:
access to military end-users;
operational validation;
testing infrastructure;
structured feedback;
visibility among Member State representatives;
better understanding of military requirements;
evidence that supports procurement discussions;
and integration into a wider European capability community.
For a company with a relatively mature technology, this may be more strategically valuable than another early-stage accelerator.
But it also changes what companies need to demonstrate.
The question is no longer only:
Is the technology innovative?
It becomes:
Can it become a capability?
That requires evidence around:
operational relevance;
reliability;
integration;
interoperability;
production readiness;
security;
logistics;
training;
maintenance;
and deployment.
Companies entering HEDI-type environments therefore need to think beyond the product itself.
They need to understand the military system around it.
The remaining problem
HEDI 2.0 addresses an important bottleneck.
But experimentation is not the final destination.
A technology can complete a successful OPEX campaign.
Military users can validate it.
Technical problems can be resolved.
A procurement blueprint can be created.
And the technology can still fail to reach meaningful deployment.
The final transition depends on governments.
They must allocate budgets, define requirements, run procurement processes and place orders.
This is where the success of HEDI 2.0 will ultimately be measured.
Not by the number of technologies scouted.
Not by the number of innovation events organised.
Not even by the number of successful demonstrations.
The real metric is whether technologies move into military inventories faster than before.
That is the larger shift behind HEDI 2.0.
European defence innovation is gradually moving away from asking:
How do we generate more innovation?
towards a more difficult question:
How do we turn innovation into capability?
