The game has changed, and the stakes are rising faster than ever. As Managing Director at Fujitsu’s Centre for Cognitive and Advanced Technologies, I explained this in my keynote at the Farnborough International Airshow, offering three powerful concepts that frame the future and demand our attention if we are to thrive in this new era:

• The non-discretionary participation in Innovation Wars;
• The need for a Theory of Winning, that leads, not follows tech trends;
• Innovation Escape Velocity: the automation of innovation itself. Get ahead, and you may never be caught. Fall into lag, and you may never catch up.

Innovation Wars

We are now living in an age of Innovation Wars. In both markets and the military, the traditional methods of gaining competitive advantage through specific products or services have been eclipsed. What matters most today is not what you sell but how you innovate. It’s no longer just about having the best technology – it’s about constantly developing, refining, and outpacing competitors in the realm of ideas and execution.

The rapidly decreasing lifespan of companies on the S&P 500 is one stark illustration of this pressure. In the 1950s, a company could expect to last about 60 years on the index. Today, that average has dropped to just ten years. This dramatic shift reflects the speed at which industries are disrupted and how quickly the ever-advancing tide of progress consumes those who fail to innovate.

For Defence, right up until the First World War, technology came first, and the tactics came second. The longbow preceded Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) by hundreds of years. Catapults in ancient history were much the same, so too machine guns, submarines, aircraft in modern history: we took years to work out how to fully apply new technologies in battle to make the most of their capabilities.

Today, technologies are obsolete within months – the pace of change in Ukraine is six weeks, particularly in cutting-edge fields like drone and electronic warfare. As in business, so on the battlefield: participation is non-discretionary; adapt or die.

Theory of Winning

To succeed in Innovation Wars, you to have a theory of winning. Following technology trends will leave you behind; the only way to win is to start ahead. As Jeff Bezos put it, you need to “think backwards”, starting with a clear vision of the future and inventing the technology to create it. But we’ve known this for over a century.

This quiet revolution – from taking tech and figuring out how to use it, to working out what you needed to win and building it – was led in the First World War by thinkers like Frederick Lindemann, later the chief scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in the Second World War, and known as “the Prof”.

In the First World War, before his fame, Lindemann was stationed at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough, where today’s airshow takes place. With his colleagues, he was a dynamic source of innovative ideas throughout the Great War: ranging from acoustic submarine detection to weather prediction and acoustic range and direction finding for artillery. However, the ideas he pitched, now obviously prescient, were continuously rebuffed. As his biographer put it, “…it is difficult to dispel the picture of a reservoir of bright ideas from factory scientists lapping fruitlessly at against the solid dam of the War Office mind.”

Lindemann understood the importance of transforming defence with technology that didn’t exist but could be envisaged. In the 1930s, the notion that ‘the bomber always gets through’ led to Government, the War Office and many in the RAF refusing to invest in fighter aircraft and air defences. Lindemann, with Churchill, campaigned and helped establish the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence (CSSAD), called the Tizard Committee after Henry Tizard, its chairman. This committee, in turn, drove the development of the Dowding System, which, with those fighter aircraft – notably Spitfires – that many had argued they didn’t need and wouldn’t work, won the Battle of Britain.

We’ve seen this approach bear fruit in more recent decades. In 1978, for instance, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the Assault Breaker concept to address the potential threat of huge second-echelon Soviet forces pouring into Europe. That led to Air-Land Battle and the development of a system to enable it, including JSTARS, UAVs, the multirole F-16, Apache helicopters and the F-15E Strike Eagle.

For me, this is the essence of a theory of winning: you don’t wait for the future to arrive. You imagine it and then work backwards to build the tools you need to thrive in that future.

The same holds true, I think, for businesses’ innovation cycles. They are shrinking, and the only way to survive is by developing a theory of winning that anticipates where the world is headed and builds for it.

And we must face a stark truth – we’ve gone backwards. In Defence, we lack an overarching theory of winning. Walking through the Farnborough Airshow felt like seeing all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle laid out – an array of incredible technologies – but with no one knowing what the finished picture should look like.

Trying to retrofit the pieces together wouldn’t work; innovation requires a theory of winning that pulls all the disparate elements into a cohesive strategy. Without that clear vision of the future – a theory of winning – even the most advanced technologies can lose their impact.

Innovation Escape Velocity

Perhaps the most provocative idea I presented is the notion of innovation escape velocity. This is the point at which a country or company gains such a significant technological lead – particularly in applying AI to…

• recursive self-improvement;
• science in self-driving labs;
• manufacturing in generative design;
• the automation of manufacturing itself

…that it enables recursive self-improvement: where AI is improving AI (hardware and software) – in mid-September, a month or so after the Farnborough talk, Sakana.AI reported that they have LLMs building better LLMs. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, claimed AI was now advancing at ‘Moore’s Law Squared’ because AI is now designing better AI hardware. These are not isolated examples.

Self-driving labs are those running experiments and research at superhuman speeds. As I said in the talk – in 2018, if you searched Google Scholar, there was not a single reference to self-driving labs. Searching in July 2024, I found 112 results already, and all the leading science journals have published papers produced in self-driving labs (albeit with human input still – for now).

Generative design uses AI to create 3D manufacturable designs the way you can create instant artistic images with, say OpenAI’s DALL-E. It’s a nascent field but progressing rapidly. It’s no secret that factories have become ever more automated over recent decades.

Combine these areas, and you can see that the nation or business that gets to AGI first could see AI and scientific runaways, as well as innovation runaways, as the whole process is connected and automated.

To show this is not science fiction, I ran through the evidence in the presentation, showing how fast AI progress is moving.

This pace of change is unprecedented. An analysis by McKinsey sums this up. They showed how, in comparison with the Industrial Revolution, today, technology is advancing at 30 times the speed, 300 times the scale, and with 3000 times the impact.

Hence, I argue that if you’re ahead in these critical areas, you will continue to accelerate beyond your rivals’ ability to keep pace. Conversely, if you fall behind, you may never close the gap.

For me, this is why the idea of innovation escape velocity matters: it’s not just about being competitive; it’s about ensuring that you’re not left behind for good.

A Call to Action

My final challenge to the audience was both simple and daunting: we must win the race. Whether in business or Government, there is no higher priority. The only way to ensure long-term success is to invest in technologies that don’t yet exist, design strategies that anticipate the future, and build innovation systems capable of keeping pace with the relentless speed of change.

How can Western nations tap the huge opportunities presented by these technologies and avoid being left behind by autocratic rivals? Collaboration with like-minded allies is one possibility. This was the focus of a panel discussion that followed my Farnborough presentation.

The panel focused on the Hiroshima Accord, the enhanced UK-Japan global strategic partnership that strengthens military collaboration between the two countries. The accord covers different elements, including a commitment that the UK will deploy its Carrier Strike Group to the Indo-Pacific in 2025, along with boosts to joint exercises. However, it also includes research and development in advanced military technologies.

Professor Alessio Patalano highlighted the evolving strategic alignment between the UK and Japan that made the Hiroshima Accord possible. He noted that both countries shifted from distinct starting points – Japan initially focused on state-centric threats like North Korea and China, while the UK was centred on non-state challenges such as terrorism and insurgency. By 2021, the two nations were both focused on state threats, leading to a shared worldview on security.

He highlighted three major factors: the alignment of strategic worldviews, a re-evaluation of their international roles, and the necessity of developing advanced defence technologies together. As Patalano stated, "From a technology point of view, [the collaboration] is geographically agnostic but geopolitically relevant," pointing out that the challenges of technological warfare make cooperation across regions, such as the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, essential.

Policy Exchange’s Sophia Gaston emphasised the indivisibility of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres, positioning the UK and Japan as key “guardians” of a doctrine that recognises their inseparability. She stressed the strategic importance of integrating economic and national security objectives, particularly in the areas of advanced technology and innovation. She highlighted the challenges of persuading the UK Treasury that prosperity and security were distinct alternatives, with the latter the priority. Rather there is no prosperity without security. Gaston also pointed out that the British people "get this" concept, referencing public sentiment after Xi Jinping's visit to Moscow and her work on public sentiment towards China and Russia as evidence of growing awareness that global threats are interconnected. Her focus was on ensuring continued dialogue and commitment to the Indo-Pacific while also highlighting the need for the UK to prioritise resources efficiently in this constrained economic environment.

Fujitsu’s Alan Brown highlighted the gap between rhetoric and reality in defence innovation, quipping that the UK would be fine “so long as the next war is fought with announcements”. He underscored the urgency required in defence and technology collaboration, warning that while valuable agreements like AUKUS and GCAP are in place and should be celebrated, their timelines – delivering submarines and advanced combat aircraft in the late 2030s, are not aligned with the urgency of the threat. UK-Japan collaboration under the Hiroshima Accord must be different. He pointed out that collaboration should focus on developing "high-volume, low-cost rapid manufacturing capabilities" to counter more immediate risks and ensure resilience across allied nations.

Conclusion

Whatever steps we take to get to grips with this new world, one thing is clear – we must move quickly – both alone and together with allies like Japan. Long timelines and announcements with little substance won’t help.

Lindemann worked on one of the first “automatic pilot” systems at Farnborough back in 1915, giving it a claim to be the birthplace of uncrewed aircraft. He described how “We were agreeably surprised to find that the very first of these devices flew the plane about twice as accurately as a good pilot”. Today, as the USAF’s dogfighting uncrewed F-16s show, AI has advanced to the point that there won’t be a need for pilots, even in the world’s most advanced aircraft. The surprises automation offers won’t always be as agreeable as Lindemann’s.

To respond, we will need the collaboration and shared worldview that Alessio notes is embodied in the Hiroshima Accord. It will need the support of a British public that Sophia notes we should trust more, and it will require a recognition that if the breakthroughs in AI come in China, the CCP’s geographic distance from Britain will be irrelevant. As Alan Brown urged, we must get beyond war by announcements, to substance, urgency, speed and scale.

In other words, we must triumph in the innovation wars, with allies or alone, before our adversaries achieve innovation escape velocity. If we lose, we may never regain our advantage.