Clearing a Path From Pentagon Labs to Products
On the Defense Department’s Patent Holiday and the push to commercialize what already exists.
The U.S. Department of Defense spends roughly $3.3 billion a year across 216 laboratories, generating hundreds of patents annually and thousands more over decades of research. Much of that technology was never designed with a commercial endpoint in mind - and much of it has remained unused not because it failed, but because moving it out of government systems and into the hands of builders has been slow, opaque, and unnecessarily cumbersome. The Pentagon’s new “Defense Patent Holiday” is best understood as an attempt to change that: a pragmatic push to make government innovation easier to find, easier to test, and easier to turn into something real.
“It’s a frustrating point,” Emil Michael, the Department of Defense’s Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, told a packed conference room in Washington, DC. “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.”
Michael’s argument is not that the Pentagon needs to invent more, but that it needs to use what it already has more effectively. It needs to apply basic industry practices, namely clarity, accessibility, and speed, to technology that already exists. The Defense Patent Holiday is framed as a first step toward that goal.
What Is the Defense Patent Holiday?
As of January 2026, the Department of Defense has begun offering no-fee Commercial Evaluation Licenses (CELs) for approximately 400 government-owned patents. These licenses allow companies to evaluate a patented technology’s technical performance, market potential, and business viability over a two-year period without paying upfront licensing fees.
During the evaluation window, firms can test and integrate these technologies into research and development efforts, explore scale-up challenges, and assess whether commercialization makes sense before committing to a longer-term licensing arrangement.
“We want to provide the innovators in industry a clear path to move technology from the lab into the hands of the American warfighter and the American consumer,” Michael said. “This ‘Patent Holiday’ program is the start of a new era of collaboration.”
How the Program Works
According to the Department of Defense, the initiative is being implemented in two phases.
Phase One makes roughly 400 curated patents available online for a two-year trial period under no-cost CELs. Any company interested in evaluating one of these technologies for use in products or R&D efforts can apply.
Phase Two, now underway, focuses on consolidation. The Pentagon is working to bring its broader patent portfolio, potentially thousands of patents from all 216 defense laboratories, into a single, searchable system. This effort relies on public–private partnerships and existing federal infrastructure to reduce fragmentation and improve discoverability.
The available patents span high-interest technology areas including cybersecurity, data science, IoT, autonomy, advanced manufacturing, and physical sciences, with contributions from organizations such as the Navy, NSA, and Army research centers.
Inventory Before Commercialization
The 400 patents were not selected at random. They were curated around priority technology areas and chosen using a mix of expert judgment and artificial intelligence-driven analysis. At this scale, the challenge is not invention but sorting: determining which technologies are mature enough, relevant enough, or flexible enough to warrant outside experimentation.
Importantly, the Pentagon is not betting on immediate uptake. Few startups or small companies are realistically positioned to jump into defense-adjacent commercialization overnight. Large defense primes, well-capitalized dual-use firms, and organizations already familiar with government contracting are far more likely to engage early.
That does not make the effort symbolic. Even limited participation provides signal. Which technologies attract attention, which are ignored, and which prove difficult to adapt all help the Department understand where its intellectual property has real-world pull, and where it does not.
A Familiar Pattern
NASA offers a useful precedent. Many technologies developed for spaceflight, ranging from advanced materials and imaging techniques to water purification and medical diagnostics, sat idle for years before finding broader civilian use. The problem was rarely technical failure. More often, it was the absence of a clear path from lab to market.
NASA’s Spinoff program eventually documented how reducing friction, simplifying licensing, improving visibility, and letting industry experiment, allowed previously niche technologies to diffuse into everyday life. The Pentagon’s patent backlog reflects a similar dynamic: not wasted innovation, but underused capability.
Where to Explore the Patents
For companies, researchers, or entrepreneurs interested in exploring what is available, several entry points already exist:
TechLink – A Department of Defense partner that manages licensing and technology transfer from military laboratories: https://www.techlinkcenter.org
ERDC Technology Transfer – The Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s portal for patented technologies: https://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/Innovation/Technology-Transfer/
Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) – A broader gateway to technologies from federal labs, including DoD: https://www.federallabs.org
So What?
The Defense Patent Holiday is not a giveaway and not a silver bullet. It is a modest efficiency reform, an attempt to lower barriers, encourage experimentation, and apply commercial logic to government-owned innovation that already exists.
Its real value may lie less in immediate commercialization than in preparation. By taking stock of its intellectual property, improving discoverability, and inviting industry to test what works, the Pentagon is laying groundwork for faster technology delivery in the future.
In that sense, the initiative is less about novelty than about follow-through. Before government innovation can move faster, it first has to move more easily, from the lab, to the market, and ultimately, to use. If this experiment works, even modestly, it offers a template for how other parts of the federal government might unlock value that already exists but remains trapped behind process.