Europe's Innovation Agencies Team Up on Drone Defense

European innovation agencies are doing something they've rarely done before: working together to fund technology that could protect civilian spaces from hostile drones.

Germany's SPRIND and Sweden's Vinnova have partnered to back teams across Europe developing systems to defend airports, nuclear plants, and public spaces. One team, led by robotics professor Martin Saska at Czech Technical University in Prague, is already building anti-drone defenses with their support.

The partnership goes beyond funding a single project. It represents a new way for Europe to compete on innovation speed and scale.

Mario Draghi's recent report on European competitiveness revealed the continent was falling behind in bringing radical ideas to market. The SPRIND-Vinnova partnership, formalized last year, aims to fix that gap.

"We need to have a fundamentally different way of funding innovation if we want to see different results," says Jano Costard, head of challenges at SPRIND. The agencies took inspiration from DARPA, the U.S. defense agency that helped create the internet and GPS, but stripped away the military framing.

SPRIND launched in 2020 with unusual legal freedom for how it spends money. A 2023 German parliamentary act even allowed it to take equity stakes in startups, something most German public bodies cannot do.

Vinnova brings two decades of experience with a similar approach. Sweden, with just 10 million people, produced more than 500 IPOs in the past decade. That's more than Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands combined.

The Ripple Effect

The collaboration shows how public agencies can move faster when they work across borders. By pooling resources and expertise, SPRIND and Vinnova are helping European innovators compete globally without waiting for lengthy bureaucratic approvals.

"Europe as a whole needs to invest more in radical breakthrough innovation," says Darja Isaksson, director general of Vinnova. The goal is making it easier for private venture capital to spot promising projects and invest alongside public funding.

The anti-drone challenge addresses a real and growing security concern while proving that European agencies can respond quickly to emerging threats. Teams across multiple countries now have support to develop solutions that individual nations might struggle to fund alone.

Europe is building its own path to breakthrough innovation, one cross-border partnership at a time.