The market has arrived. The communications infrastructure hasn't.
The convergence of defence and commercial technology is no longer a trend to watch. It is an established structural reality. As of mid-2025, more than 17,600 dual-use technology scaleups are operating across NATO member states — approximately one in four of all scaleups analysed in the sector. Investment into this space reached nearly $1.2 trillion in 2025, representing a 25% year-on-year increase.
The scale of capital allocation signals something unambiguous: institutional investors, governments, and commercial enterprises have all concluded that the boundary between defence technology and commercial technology is effectively gone. Organisations that can operate credibly across both contexts represent a fundamentally different category of capability — and the market is pricing them accordingly.
What has not kept pace is how these organisations talk about themselves.
Why dual-use companies default to two narratives — and why that fails
The communications challenge facing dual-use technology businesses is structurally predictable. It stems from a genuine asymmetry in what can be disclosed.
Defence contracts, by their nature, often cannot be named. The clients are confidential. The applications are sensitive. The outcomes are classified. This pushes organisations toward silence in one direction precisely when they are doing their most technically demanding work.
Commercial markets, by contrast, demand visibility. Buyers require proof points. Procurement processes require case studies. Sales cycles require something concrete to point to. So organisations reach for whatever they can talk about — often their least complex or least differentiated work — and build their public narrative around it.
The result is an identity that quietly undermines itself. Defence audiences encounter an organisation that looks primarily commercial. Commercial audiences encounter an organisation that is reluctant to explain what it actually does. Neither reads as the serious, capable partner both are looking for.
Running two parallel narratives — one for each audience — compounds the problem. It introduces inconsistency, forces organisations into constant contextual management, and creates the impression of a business that has not yet decided what it is.
The moment a procurement officer asks for references and you have to explain why you can't provide them, you've already lost ground. It doesn't matter how good the capability is. You need a way to make the capability visible without making the client visible.
VP Business Development, NATO-aligned communications technology firm
The capability narrative: what it is, and why it works
The organisations that navigate the dual-use environment effectively have not found a way to say more than they are permitted to say. They have built a different kind of narrative altogether — one anchored in capability rather than in client history.
A capability narrative operates at a different level of abstraction from a case study. It describes the class of problem an organisation solves, the conditions of complexity it operates under, the rigour it applies to its methodology, and the outcomes it consistently produces — without requiring a named contract to substantiate any of it.
This matters for a specific reason: the attributes that make an organisation valuable in a classified defence context — technical depth, operational discipline, structured thinking under uncertainty, the ability to deliver in low-information environments — are precisely the attributes that differentiate high-value commercial partners from commodity providers. A defence contract cannot be named. The capability that delivered it can still be demonstrated.
Done well, a capability narrative is simultaneously true in both contexts. It does not require the defence audience to read between the lines, and it does not require the commercial audience to take claims on faith. It creates a single, coherent identity that holds across the full range of stakeholders an organisation needs to address.
The question dual-use businesses are asking — and the better question
Most dual-use technology businesses approaching their communications challenge ask a version of the same question: which story do we tell to which audience?
This is the wrong question. It assumes the problem is one of segmentation — that with the right targeting, the right message can reach the right stakeholder through the right channel. The segmentation insight is real, but it is secondary. Targeting cannot compensate for a narrative that is structurally incoherent.
The more precise question is: have we built a narrative that is simultaneously true in both contexts? One that does not require us to omit material facts for one audience or overclaim for another? One that a government procurement officer and a commercial CTO could read independently and both find credible?
For most dual-use organisations, the honest answer is no. The narrative has been constructed around what is available to say rather than what the organisation actually is. That is the actual problem — and it is a solvable one.
What solving it requires
Constructing a capability narrative that works across defence and commercial contexts is not primarily a copywriting exercise. It requires a structured process: a rigorous examination of what the organisation genuinely does, the extraction of the durable, transferable capabilities that underpin its work, and the translation of those capabilities into language that is precise without being classified and credible without requiring a client list.
It also requires discipline. The temptation, when building a capability narrative, is to hedge — to include enough specificity to satisfy commercial audiences while remaining vague enough not to compromise defence relationships. The result is a narrative that convinces neither. Precision and discretion are not in tension if the narrative is constructed correctly. They are both properties of the same well-built thing.
For organisations operating at the intersection of defence and commercial markets, the communications challenge is real. But it is not primarily a function of what cannot be said. It is a function of not yet having built the narrative architecture that makes the unsayable unnecessary.
The organisations we work with aren't short of credibility. They're short of a way to make that credibility legible to the audiences they need to reach. That's a structural problem, and it has a structural solution. It just requires someone to build it properly.
Dominic Walters, CEO, IMCC