Pentagon CTO Launches Free Two-Year Trial for Select Government Lab Patents to Boost Industry Innovation

The Pentagon allocates $3.3 billion annually to its 216 research laboratories, which collectively hold thousands of patents for advanced technologies. However, many of these innovations remain underutilized, rarely reaching operational deployment or commercial application. Addressing this challenge, Emil Michael, the Department of Defense’s Chief Technology Officer and Under Secretary for Research & Engineering, publicly launched a two-pronged initiative to unlock the value of these patents.

Speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, Michael highlighted the core problem: “Why do these innovations — and we have thousands of them in the labs, billions of dollars worth of IP that’s been created by the great minds in the labs — why does it not get all the way out there to the warfighter? In part, it’s because you don’t know where to go to find them. They’re all over the place. They’re not categorized, they’re not available.”

The first step, effective immediately, is the release of approximately 400 carefully selected patents online for a free two-year trial period. Companies interested in exploring these technologies can obtain a Commercial Evaluation License (CEL) without paying the usual fees. This pilot program includes diverse innovations, such as a Navy-developed drone tracking system and novel Army mortar fuses, chosen based on their alignment with Michael’s recently identified six Critical Technology Areas.

Given the vast number of patents across numerous labs, Michael’s team employed artificial intelligence to sift through and identify the most promising candidates. “Here are the patents we think are important, are interesting, have merit, that you can develop on and potentially productize,” Michael explained. “We’re going to give you a two-year patent holiday, royalty-free.”

Should companies find success during the trial and wish to continue using the patents beyond the free period, Michael expressed openness to negotiating long-term licensing arrangements. “See what you could do with them, see if you can make a business out of them, and then come back to us … and let’s figure out a long term-arrangement,” he told attendees at the Pentagon-backed conference hosted by consulting firm SMI.

Michael emphasized that the Pentagon currently earns negligible revenue from patent licensing, not due to patent quality but because of limited awareness and accessibility. “The amount of money that we make from patent fees today is infinitesimal — and it’s not because they’re not good patents, [it’s] because you don’t know about them, and we haven’t created enough of a way for you to get to them and develop on them,” he said.

The second component of the initiative involves consolidating all patents from the Department’s 216 labs into a single searchable database for the first time. This effort leverages the existing public-private partnership TechLink and the interagency iEdison database managed by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST). Currently, iEdison contains patents from 36 federal agencies, including 10 Defense Department labs.

Bethany Loftin, director of the Technology Partnerships Office at NIST, reported significant progress on this front. An interagency Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been finalized to onboard the remaining 206 Defense labs. “I keep checking my phone this morning because the final MOU for that relationship is on my boss’s desk for final signature,” Loftin said during a panel following Michael’s keynote. “So hopefully, maybe even before the end of the day we’ll be able to officially start the process of getting DoD, as a whole, onboarded onto iEDISON.”

Michael clarified that while the thousands of patents in the database will not be available royalty-free, he remains open to negotiating terms. The initial 400 patents offered royalty-free serve as a “freebie,” “door-buster,” or “loss-leader” to stimulate interest and investment. “Then hopefully you’ll get interested enough that you could look at the whole broad portfolio,” he told reporters.

If the pilot program generates significant industry engagement and leads to the development of usable military equipment, Michael indicated the possibility of expanding the royalty-free offering. “That’s why it’s a pilot, right? We’re trying to see what happens when you put things out in the wild,” he said.

The concept of a “Patent Holiday” emerged from Michael’s ambition to rapidly build a comprehensive data estate for Defense Department intellectual property. Steve Luckowski, the Pentagon’s director of Technology Transfer, Transition, and Commercial Partnerships, noted, “I was like, ‘I want to build a data estate.’”

This initiative represents a strategic effort to bridge the gap between government-developed technologies and commercial innovation, potentially accelerating the deployment of cutting-edge solutions to the warfighter and the broader market.