The MIT academic will take part in the Dual Hub Summit by Know Hub, where he will share his experience in dual innovation: a strategy that brings together defense, industry, academia and the public sector to generate real economic impact.
When Gene Keselman talks about dual innovation, he does so with the conviction of someone who has been at the center of its design and evolution. As executive director of MIT Mission Innovation Experimental (MIX) and managing director of Proto Ventures, MIT’s venture studio, he has worked for years to turn frontier technologies into solutions that serve both the civilian and defense worlds.
But for Keselman, the problem is not a lack of talent or ideas, but structures. “Very few governments can tell themselves the truth about what they should be doing,” he says. And what they should do, he adds, is not act like entrepreneurs or hand-pick which startups to fund, but create clear conditions: defined problems, demand signals, funding, and then get out of the way.
Keselman will be in Chile on August 5 as a guest at the Dual Hub Summit by Know Hub, which seeks to drive this kind of cross-sector collaboration in Latin America. In his experience, countries like Chile, with growing science ecosystems and a focus on innovation, have enormous potential if they adopt a strategic approach.
“At MIT I have met many Chileans who have told me about government programs focused on innovation. And I have seen that small countries can achieve much more than you would expect given their size,” he says. One example is Estonia: “They had an existential threat nearby and few resources. They decided to be the digital capital of the Baltics, maybe of Europe. They put policies in place that made it possible. Today you can get a digital citizenship in 15 minutes and file your taxes in three.”
But Keselman cautions that it is not about copying models, but about designing incentive structures adapted to the local context. “It won’t turn them into another United States, but they made the most of the capacity they had,” he says. “I have a phrase I use a lot: structure is destiny. If you structure programs, incentives and policies well, any country can do it.”
For him, dual innovation is a strategic decision. “It means nothing to say you are going to invest in ‘dual-use companies.’ What matters is whether you decide to adopt a dual-use strategy, going after both commercial and government customers and funding.”
—How can you tell whether a country is on the right track with its innovation strategy?
“A good indicator is whether direct funding programs for startups are growing. How many apply, how many win, how much interest they generate. If nobody applies, the program is probably poorly designed. That happened to us at MIT too. We had hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody applied because it was too difficult or uncertain. When you fix it, you notice: everyone starts talking about it.”
But even with good programs, one challenge remains: talent capable of translating advanced science into commercial impact. At MIT, he has worked to train people who can move between those two worlds. “When our venture builders walk into a lab, they are like any other scientist. But while everyone else is thinking about publishing or research, they are thinking about the market. That changes the system.”
—How can a country like Chile develop that kind of talent?
“Everyone has that problem. We wanted to attract the best, the ones who have every option in the world. And for that, we designed a program so attractive they couldn’t say no. We gave them full access to the MIT ecosystem, two years of salary and support, a top-tier advisory board, and whatever they built would be entirely theirs. No MIT equity. That was key. If we had told them we were keeping 20% of their company, they would have said: ‘Why do I need you?'”
As global attention on dual innovation grows, Keselman believes the time is now. “The world is not becoming a more peaceful or safer place,” he says. And while a dual strategy requires courage, the first step, he says, is simple: “Don’t do what you do badly. And the hard part, of course, is knowing what you do badly.”
