This brief provides an analytical framework to identify, categorize, and assess the diverse array of factors that are involved in the pursuit of defense innovation, as viewed through an innovation ecosystem prism. Defense innovation systems are engaged in highly complex, time-consuming and resource-intensive work. Many of the insights from this framework are derived from an extensive examination into the state of innovation in the contemporary Chinese defense science, technology, andindustrial system, examined in more detail in Brief 2018-3 in this series.

Xi Jinping has significantly elevated the importance of national security and technological innovation in China’s overall priorities since coming to power in 2012. Under his leadership, China has sought to integrate the country’s economy, political system, society, and defense apparatus behind the goal of national security. This brief explores the newest and most sweeping iteration of that policy: national strategic integration, which aims to remake China into the global leader in technology and security.

In the struggle for global geo-strategic and geo-economic supremacy between the United States and China, the technosecurity sphere where economics, technological innovation, and national security meet has become a principal battleground. Two contrasting models are pitted against each other: China’s state-led top-down approach and the United States’ marketdriven bottom-up system. Which of them will ultimately prevail will depend on how capable, robust, and adept they are in meeting the challenge of rapid and disruptive change. This brief examines the underpinnings of U.S.-China great power technosecurity competition and assesses what the countries’ different approaches imply for future techno-security rivalry.

This policy brief examines how innovation takes place within the Chinese defense research, development, and acquisition (RDA) system. This begins with a short review of the evolving frameworks of analysis of technological innovation in industrial systems, with prominence given to the coupled technology-push, market-pull model. Over the past 60 years, the Chinese defense RDA system has evolved from a top-down to a coupled model of interaction between weapons developers and military end-users. Important reforms have been taking place in the Chinese defense RDA system since the late 1990s, but serious structural impediments continue to exist that threatens to blunt the effectiveness of these improvements and keep the system in a trapped transition.

Since coming to power, Xi Jinping has significantly elevated the importance of national security and technological innovation in the country’s overall priorities. He has invested considerable time, effort, and political capital to establish an expansive techno-security state based upon his strategic and ideological vision. This brief examines the five major methods Xi’s administration has undertaken to develop its techno-security state: developing a national security state, innovation-driven development, military strengthening, military-civilian fusion, and economic securitization.

The preceding brief in the series provided an analytical framework for examining a country’s defense innovation system and the factors that shape innovation outcomes. This brief applies the framework to examine the factors at work in the Chinese defense innovation system. There are many reasons explaining the successful transformation of the Chinese defense innovation system from an ossified dinosaur in the 1990s to an increasingly credible military technological competitor on the global stage at the end of the 2010s. China’s approach to defense innovation has undergone considerable evolution since it launched a full-fledged modernization of its defense science, technology, and industrial (DSTI) system in the late 1990s. Some of these changes mirror what has taken place within the civilian sector, but there is also much that is different because of the specific dynamics of the defense arena.