Building Innovative Partnerships
To remain at the cutting edge of the complex weapons field, MBDA needs to constantly develop, adapt and adopt new technologies. Working together with our current and future potential partners helps to develop concepts and deliver game-changing solutions. Cooperation is key to creating the next biggest and most valuable innovation.

Open Innovation
We collaborate with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), research institutes, academia, suppliers and our customers. Sourcing ideas and creativity globally, we create an open innovation approach that embraces other partners. This is essential to understanding more accurately the technologies of the future and their application to our customers’ needs.
Our innovation strategy is double, both in and outbound: we integrate knowledge, methods and technologies that exist outside the company, but also we bring innovation that exists inside the company to market. It is also a coupled process, where we work in alliance with our partners and stakeholders.
We carefully monitor areas such as artificial intelligence; connectivity and cooperative engagement; sensors, antennas and materials; immersive experience and mixed reality; quantum technologies; augmented engineering methods; cyber and safety technologies; and other domains.
Through systematic technology scouting and calls for ideas, we identify every year over hundreds of potential partners.
- After an initial evaluation, we engage with the most relevant and promising potential partners.
- After initial exploration, projects continue further in an R&D programme, funded projects, or venture capital investments…

“Inside MBDA, we are not a ‘closed shop’ to innovation and welcome the involvement of our customers, suppliers, SMEs, laboratories, institutes and universities as our partners in innovation."
E3 Initiative
Detecting and engaging over a long time frame with reliable partners requires a structured step-by-step approach. At MBDA we have implemented a dedicated Open Innovation programme named E3.
E3 is organised around three pillars:
- Explore: Screening, targeting and tracking new partners that will bring disruptive technologies and innovations.
- Engage: Creating relationships with key innovative SMEs to optimise maturation and exploitation of technologies.
- Endure: Maintaining a community of SMEs by caring about their sustainable development, reconciling the long development cycles of the defence business with the short term needs and constraints of SMEs.

The Complex Weapons Innovation Technology Partnership (CW ITP)
One example of how open innovation shapes future weapon systems is this research fund. Open to all Anglo-French companies and academic institutions, it’s managed by MBDA and sponsored by the two countries’ defence authorities. The fund provides annual support to proposals from industry, SMEs and academia with the aim of developing novel, exploitable technologies for generation-after-next weapon systems.

Ways to collaborate with MBDA UK
Engaging in an ‘open innovation’ approach is an essential part of this value. We welcome collaboration with our customers, funding bodies, shareholders, suppliers, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), research and technology organisations (RTO’s), universities, trade organisations, laboratories and institutes as our partners in innovation.
