Jen Mielguj, Director IP & Partnerships, DIGITAL & Dr. Jaspreet Grewal, CEO & Founder AxialBridge & Managing Partner Access Innovation BioBridge
DIGITAL was proud to be an Associate Partner at this year’s Canada-in-Asia Conference (CIAC), the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada’s flagship event, focused on unlocking opportunities for Canada and Asia across three crucial pillars of food security, energy security, and infrastructure.
While in Singapore, DIGITAL contributed to a multisectoral roundtable discussion convened by AxialBridge and Access Innovation BioBridge examining how dual-use innovation, public-private partnerships, and venture-studio models strengthen system-level resilience. The discussion highlighted structural risks, commercialisation bottlenecks, governance misalignment, and opportunities for strategic reset.
Dual-use technologies — innovations designed for civilian applications that can also be used for military purposes — now sit at the centre of Canada’s national security and economic competitiveness agenda. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biosecurity platforms, advanced sensing systems, autonomous drones and federated data architectures are not niche defence technologies. They represent a paradigm shift where the military is looking to civilian-born systems for cutting edge technologies and applications.
A key theme identified, as geopolitical competition intensifies, was that a structural asymmetry presents both risk and opportunity for Canada. This reveals a critical tension which requires a new architecture for dual-use innovation built around principles including:
- clarity of definition and the notion of the creation of a national taxonomy,
- early national security integration designed to embed guardrails before strategic risk accumulates whilst not blocking innovation,
- interoperable allied governance creating resilience with frameworks, standards and classifications aligned with trusted partners,
- capital and procurement alignment and
- preserving IP domicile, and secure commercialisation pathways integrating multiple actors such as regulators, operators and investors into structured commercialisation models and first-customer pathways.
These principles underscore that a shift cannot be achieved by any single organization and requires strategic collaboration and integration across many actors. As Canada’s Global Innovation Cluster for Digital Technologies, DIGITAL builds deep collaboration by bringing together industry, academia, and government voices into the same room. Through a framework focused on speed and scale, and deployment over demonstration, DIGITAL is co-investing with the private sector, de-risking innovation, connecting Canadian companies with real buyers and helping Canadian companies identify and scale dual-use solutions.
The roundtable concluded with a heightening resolve that this moment represents a strategic reset. Dual-use innovation presents both a sovereign risk and a generational opportunity. Dual-use innovation is not a niche file. It is the convergence point of national security, economic strategy, and allied interoperability.
It behooves all of us to work together to co-design a deliberate ecosystem blueprint architecture integrating governance, capital, procurement and commercialisation from the outset that can strengthen sovereign capability and align innovation with national interest from the outset.
DIGITAL frequently shares new business opportunities with our network and Members, including hosted thought leadership discussions, international trade delegations and more. We’re also working with attendees of our Leadership Series events to continue the momentum of these conversations. Subscribe to our newsletter or send a message/reach out to Jen Mielguj at jmielguj@digitalsupercluster.ca for more information.