Speech

Hello Bucharest and good morning to you all at GoTech World. It’s an honour to open this second day of this great event. I was present with you last year and if you invite me, I’ll continue to be with you.
Thank you Alex Maxineanu for inviting me again and for giving me the opportunity to speak about NATO and innovation.

Let me start with a few concrete examples to illustrate what innovation looks like at NATO.
I am the chair of the Board of the Innovation Board in NATO, which coordinates innovation efforts within the entire organisation. The NATO enterprise as we call it. So I know how much effort we are putting into this.

Did you know, for example, that NATO empowers young entrepreneurs to build technologies for the future?
This year, we worked with a university in the Netherlands and Boeing on a project called ‘Project X’. The students designed a new type of drone that can remotely access and evaluate situations inaccessible for human life – for instance in disaster areas.
And now they are building and testing their prototypes.

We also collaborate closely with small start-ups.
Last month, you will remember the large explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in an act of sabotage –it was all over the headlines.
At the same time, off the coast of Portugal, the NATO exercise Dynamic Messenger was testing a network of undersea drones to help defend against the exact kind of attack. Many of these drones were not the products of large defence companies, but small start-ups.

Another example is the NATO innovation challenge. It’s an annual event, and I am very proud as a Romanian that my country hosted the Innovation Challenge in Romania together with NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and the NATO Communications and Information Agency.
We had 3 winning teams today. From Germany, Norway, and the United States. They came with innovative solutions to secure and manage data in a contested environment. As we see now with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, data management and safety are vital pieces to the security puzzle, not only for defence, but for everything economic.

I mention these examples to show you that innovation is very much at the heart of what NATO does.
Many might not think of NATO as a big player in the global innovation ecosystem.
But we are.
In fact, NATO is the forefront of innovation, especially in the defence and security sector and dual-use technologies.
We have the formidable advantage of bringing together 30 nations across Europe and North America. Soon 32 when Finland and Sweden become full fledge members of our Alliance.
We have an abundance of world-class academic institutions, the finest scientific researchers and amazingly creative start-ups. And we have something that our competitors do not have – our free and open societies – where talent can thrive and people can be as creative as they want. People like you!
So we clearly have the resources to set the pace of technological developments, not merely keeping up with those.

But we are increasingly being challenged.
Today, the competition for strategic advantage and the development and use of new technologies is intensifying.
At the Chinese Communist Party congress, President Xi reiterated his ambition for China to prevail in the fight to develop strategically important tech. He will try to win the battle in key core technologies.
Beijing is investing vast sums in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, with the goal to dominate the not-so-distant future.
This is not a benign competition. If authoritarian ideals were to prevail, our very freedom would be at stake.
We all have a responsibility to not let that happen.

We live in a world where our security is tied to our ability not just to innovate, but to lead innovation. So it is paramount that we remain in the driving seat.

For this, we have to innovate differently, responsibly, and cooperatively.
That is what NATO strives for and stands for.

First, innovating differently.
We have two ground-breaking innovation initiatives in NATO: the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, and the NATO Innovation Fund.
Both are radical departures to the old ways we did business in order to tackle the hard security problems we face today. Less bureaucratic. More agile. 
DIANA has a network of Test Centres and Accelerator Sites across more than 20 NATO Allies, including in Romania. This network is not based in military barracks, but out where the innovators are.
The idea is that innovators will have direct access to the end-users who will help them develop and put their ideas to use. They will also have access to expertise on how to grow and scale their business for success.
We want to support innovators to develop commercially successful companies that also serve an important security need. I hope many of you will be involved one way or another in DIANA.
Also, we have established a 1 billion Euro NATO Innovation Fund. This is the first in the world multi-sovereign venture capital fund. It will provide venture financing to cutting-edge start-ups developing dual-use technologies.
It will operate under market standards and be managed by a world-class team of venture capitalists. Not to replace or compete with private capital and venture capital, but to signal particularly promising areas where we can crowd-in further investment.

In addition to DIANA and the Fund, we are also strengthening our efforts across different key disruptive technology areas, I mentioned AI, also biotech, quantum and space.
We are developing strategies that lay the groundwork for NATO not only to accelerate innovation, but to do so responsibly – following our democratic norms, rules and regulations.

This brings me to the second point, innovating responsibly.
Our ambition is for NATO to set the gold standard on the ethical use of new technologies in defence. Not just within the Alliance, but around the world.
Our competitors may not want to face up to the important ethical dimensions in their race to develop and deploy technologies. But at NATO, we do.
We want to adopt new technologies quickly, but also in line with our democratic values. This is not to stifle innovation, but rather to create a predictable, trustworthy and responsible environment where innovators feel safe and comfortable cooperating with the defence and security sector and also, engaging with the broader needs of our democratic societies.

Finally, innovating cooperatively.
Innovating fast and responsibly at a time of profound digital transformation is no small feat. And it is not something NATO can do alone.
It requires the engagement across the triple helix of governments, private sector and academia.
That is why NATO is working ever more closely with industry, big tech companies, small start-ups and of course, academia. We want to bring together the best and brightest of minds – in our own Allied nations, and in other like-minded countries, from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa and all the way in the Indo-Pacific.
We want to engage with them to ensure we innovate for a better and brighter future.
And we want the disruptors from all areas of life: public, private and academia. The people who think and act differently. In NATO, we’re now in the business of uniting disruptors to shape a peaceful future.
Because security is everyone’s job. And we can help you and you can help us in doing that.

So let’s keep in touch. Come talk to us. We will certainly use any means to continue to reach out and work with you – the experts, the businesses and companies in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond and because I come from Romania, I think GoTech World plays a unique role in making sure that the entire Trans-Atlantic innovation ecosystem is cross-fertilising with ideas with excellent start-ups and resources. So, have a great productive and ‘innovation-full’ day. I look forward to the results of your great conference.