Examining the Potential of Public-Private Partnerships in Defence Policy: A Comparative Study of Italian and Israeli Partnerships' Epistemic Influences on Organisational Innovation

From procurement tools for military modernisation to engineers transforming the defence community, partnerships between institutions and industry promote internal innovations within the defence ecosystem. These innovations, fuelled by knowledge flows, aim to strengthen the ecosystem’s adaptability, capability and sustainability by revolutionising defence institutions, governance and policy performance to equip defence strategists with solutions to uncertainty.
Current research focuses on how technological innovation is created or communicated to
the defence community, overlooking the simultaneous internal transformations within the defence organisation. The nature of these transformations has significant implications upon a) how defence organisations learn and adopt innovation to subvert and avert complex challenges and b) what processes defence organisations go through in order to maintain the superiority they enjoy. This thesis addresses these research gaps by asking how public-private partnerships (PPPs) develop, recreate, and institutionalise knowledge in order to influence the organisational innovation of defence policy. The analysis is structured around a tripartite approach focusing on ‘knowledge management – organisational learning – organisational innovation’. This formula is applied to three learning levels: the individual, community, and organisation. Informed by case studies of the Italian and Israeli cyber, naval, and aerospace sectors, the thesis constructs an original transdisciplinary methodology which affords Liliana Andonova’s theory of dynamic institutional change. This study explains that the future of defence transformation lies with PPPs, especially since the infrastructure they build reduces concomitant consequences from threats for institutions, governance and policy performance by further enabling the defence organisation to achieve its long-term objectives in the effort to create a grand strategy of defence.Finally, the vision of this thesis articulates innovative concepts and methods, theoretical and empirical contributions to the subfield of defence innovation and encourages future qualitative and quantitative research.