The Military’s Insistence on Owning Commercial Intellectual Property is Limiting Innovation

Read our latest piece in War on the Rocks

The purpose of the First Breakfast is to scale the defense tech ecosystem by identifying and providing solutions to under-discussed technology and acquisition challenges that disproportionately affect startups and small businesses in the Defense Industrial Base. 

To that end, our recent piece in War on the Rocks with Tangram Flex CEO Caitlin Dohrman argues the U.S. government has won a Pyrrhic victory with its current posture on data rights. It gets the intellectual property it wants but not the interoperability and innovation it needs. Commercial companies - especially startups and small businesses - are put in an untenable position and boxed out from providing their best capabilities to the nation’s hardest problems. If the U.S. government mandates interoperability requirements and protects the baseline intellectual property of commercial software, there is a win-win for all parties involved.