Connecting Defense Basic Research to Industrial Innovation

U.S. federal investment in basic research has historically served as a foundation for long-term technological development, economic growth, and national security. Within the Department of Defense, basic research funding supports the upstream scientific knowledge base from which future defense capabilities emerge. However, evaluating the downstream effects of these investments remains difficult.

This report develops a reproducible, open-data method for observing the downstream technological uptake of defense-funded research through patent-paper linkages. The approach links scientific publications funded by defense basic research funding offices to patents that cite those publications as non-patent literature. Using multiple publicly available data sources, the analysis constructs agency-level indicators of technological diffusion for papers published between 2010 and 2015.