Defence Aerospace Firms: What Are the Technological Coherence of Their R&D?

This chapter focuses on the organization of the research and development (R&D) of defence aeronautic companies and their production of innovations via a patent approach. Defence aeronautical firms are intensively involved in R&D. The chapter proposes a typology of those companies according to their capacity to generate technological synergies in their innovation activity and the trade-offs they make between exploration innovations and exploitation innovations. It analyzes defence aeronautical firms in terms of their technologies. The chapter also provides an update on the measurement of technological coherence and the exploration ratio and presents a sample of firms from the defence technological and industrial base and the associated data. Measuring the technological coherence of firms requires building a global technological landscape using another data set. The chapter shows a disparity between firms in terms of turnover and a relative homogeneity in terms of patent family filing.