NATO ratifies rapid adoption action plan

NATO members endorsed the 2025 ‘Rapid Adoption Action Plan’ at the NATO Summit in The Hague on 24-25 June to accelerate procurement. 

Supported by NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), the plan aims to accelerate technology adoption across the alliance, better integrate innovative technology, and close the gap in military capability development. 

“It’s about knitting best practice [from] across the alliance”, John Ridge the Chief Adoption Officer for the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) told DSEI Gateway and other media during a briefing on 17 June ahead of the summit.

DIANA and its supporting partner NIF have been involved in developing the plan because of their alliance-wide experience, allowing them to apply their learnings on scaling and adopting new technologies, he added.

The Rapid Adoption Action Plan

The plan is separated into two key “layers”: ambitions and initiatives, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe explained in the briefing.

Under the first “layer”, three core ambitions for the alliance are outlined to improve acquisition – risk, pace, and money.

The first of these, risk, involves embracing “acquisition risk” and the “fail fast” approach, this is essential because the innovation ecosystem is already adopting this model, he explained.  

Accelerating procurement

To achieve pace, NATO's Rapid Adoption Action Plan aims to reduce the development and acquisition cycle to 24 months, from identifying a capability need to delivering it to the warfighter, rather than relying on procurement cycles that traditionally took years. 

Finally, money is required to enable innovation. A separate funding target is not, however, attached to this plan, Ellermann-Kingombe said, although NATO members are set to agree to a 3.5% core defence spending uplift at the summit, an “enormous amount of funding”. Rather, this action plan is about helping to direct and channel investment effectively into innovation, he added.

The second layer of the plan comprises a list of 19 initiatives, or what Ellermann-Kingombe described as “policy tools”.

NATO Innovation Ranges

One of the notable initiatives includes setting up new permanent experimentation facilities “on NATO soil”, allowing companies to test their products. These ‘Innovation Ranges’ are being set up based on lessons learned in Ukraine, where companies have gone to test and refine their products, Ellermann-Kingombe explained.

The most advanced is Latvia’s Sēlija testing range which is allowing NATO companies to test their uncrewed technology. 

These innovation ranges sound similar to the UK Ministry of Defence’s BattleLab in Dorset, where companies can collaborate with experts and test their ideas.

NATO Innovation Badges

Another initiative detailed in the plan involves attaching ‘NATO Innovation Badges’ to companies. These badges will act as a stamp of authenticity for technological products, demonstrating to potential investors or buyers that their technology has been used by NATO, Ellermann-Kingombe explained.

The plan also laid out how NATO intends to better inform and integrate European innovators into the defence ecosystem. 

This article has been updated following the publication of the plan.