Whether it’s NATO’s japanese entrance or the Persian Gulf, wars at this time have a spread of drivers that vary from troops to weapons techniques. Many of these superior applied sciences are dual-use in nature, typically switching between navy and business (or civilian) settings.
Bringing larger urgency to this matter, distinguished defence applied sciences which can be delicate additionally more and more have a dual-use dimension. This has critical implications throughout utilized navy sciences, autonomous techniques, cybersecurity, defence, nano supplies, and physics. Sensitive dual-use applied sciences embody superior digital infrastructure know-how, superior power know-how, superior supplies and manufacturing, superior sensing and surveillance, superior weapons, aerospace, house and satellite tv for pc know-how, synthetic intelligence and huge information know-how, human-machine integration, life science know-how, quantum science and know-how, and robotics techniques. For extra, see here.
Today’s conflicts are additionally being formed by societal perceptions of such applied sciences. Many of these applied sciences now interface ever extra deeply with society, as they energy the whole lot from defence operations to monetary markets to on-line platforms. Therefore, key challenges accompany dual-use applied sciences: Can these techniques improve safety whereas sustaining belief, transparency, and democratic legitimacy?
Despite these challenges, NATO’s democratic societies and governance mechanisms should procure and commercialize these technological techniques below a plethora of constraints, together with uncertainty, interoperability challenges, system fragmentation, integration, and compatibility challenges. Moreover, all this should happen in the public sq. below oversight and media scrutiny, and at the threat of a reputational injury.
We’re slowly starting to comprehend that resilience at this time is conditional not solely on systemic capability, but additionally on ecosystem readiness, adoption, social cohesion, and a political economic system that goals to align throughout markets, establishments, residents, patrons, customers, and customers.
It is at this level that the political economic system of advertising and marketing takes off – and my work begins.
“The most powerful military force is public opinion”
My present analysis focuses on twin‑use applied sciences and military-grade advertising and marketing. After all, the strongest navy power is public opinion formed by means of adoption and legitimacy.
I’m a tenured Associate Professor of Marketing at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, an Affiliate Faculty member with McMaster’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and a Research Affiliate at the University of Michigan. I direct the Vaid Lab for Dual‑Use Technologies, a marketing-interfacing, interdisciplinary analysis lab that straight engages with parliamentarians, researchers, corporations, policymakers, and public establishments and examines how applied sciences initially developed for defence—and more and more repurposed for civilian markets—reshape industries, markets, laws, and society.
For me, advertising and marketing science is just not a “soft” self-discipline, it’s a “mil-grade” one. The sturdiness and rigour accompanying advertising and marketing science assist form know-how provide and acceptance, communication of dangers, and democratic responses to fast-moving technological disruptions. I see advertising and marketing science at the frontline of built-in contests that vary from data and notion to legitimacy and territory.
Some folks understand “marketing” by means of the slim lens of the 4Ps solely (Product, Price, Promotion, Place) or promoting and branding solely. Yet the actuality is way extra nuanced and advanced in our deeply networked, interdependent, consumerist, and attention-oriented occasions. This has inspired students like me to deal with advertising and marketing as a core societal phenomenon that interfaces continuously throughout B2G, B2B, and B2C settings. My present analysis examines points associated to technological adoption, legitimacy, belief, and acceptance related for governments, companies, and residents.
In issues of defence economics, navy advertising and marketing, and nationwide safety, the above nuances accompanying advertising and marketing science matter deeply. The aforementioned delicate applied sciences and weapons techniques don’t function in isolation. They are conditional on transaction prices, social license, political help, civic credibility, governance mechanisms, and accountable commercialization.
Dual‑Use Technologies at the Commercial/Civil–Military Boundary
Dual‑use applied sciences have traditionally switched between each navy and business/civilian purposes. The above-discussed delicate applied sciences and others typically seen as synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity instruments, imaging and sensing applied sciences, geospatial analytics, superior supplies, and communications infrastructure have origins in defence or safety labs earlier than they have been commercialized for industrial and client markets. Today, most such dual-use applied sciences could even type the core of on-line retail, aviation, logistics, and sports activities betting continuously interfacing with end-user markets.
My analysis group is inspecting what occurs at these edges—as defence‑origin applied sciences migrate to civilian settings, or when business applied sciences are nudged into defence ecosystems.
The frequent switching and ebb and stream of these dual-use applied sciences preserve us curious: Are there greatest practices for governments to acquire applied sciences from business markets? How do companies guarantee the absence of sanctions evasion? How do companies sign threat mitigation and integrity? Are residents conscious of navy‑grade applied sciences showing in every day life? What governance mechanisms do policymakers put in place with out rising transaction prices and undermining competitiveness?
To construction these and many different questions, I developed what we name the Vaid Venn Diagram, which integrates three core dimensions. The first is the political economic system of advertising and marketing, which seems at how regulation, establishments, and public coverage form know-how provide and acceptance. The second is the know-how layer itself, specializing in advertising and marketing’s function in accelerating or inhibiting the diffusion of industrial and cyber techniques. The third is exogenous shocks—regulatory adjustments, geopolitical crises, sanctions, and agency‑degree disruptions—that reshape markets.
Interfaces throughout these dimensions assist us grasp the function of coverage and markets in transactions governing technological provide, acceptance, and resilience.
Investigating the uneven results of varieties of information breaches on key outcomes
I used to be just lately (in 2026) awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for a multi-year information breach-related analysis examine.
Data breaches happen when private data is accessed by unauthorized events, leading to service failure and hurt to stakeholders. In 2022, U.S. customers misplaced $8.8 billion to scams, a 30% enhance from the earlier 12 months. In Canada, companies lose C$7 million to breaches, with many reporting worth increases.
A precedence for quick motion is that many of the dual-use and even delicate applied sciences could also be threatened by information breaches. Costs stem from the delicate nature of information, which is tough to exchange throughout affected person, personnel, know-how, buyer, and operations and many others. settings and is very invaluable to menace actors. Moreover, since healthcare and different consumer-related information breaches are sometimes coated below a spread of Data Breach Notification Laws (DBNLs) they’re merely extra seen.
Yet the impression of information breaches related to delicate applied sciences will be way more deleterious for NATO international locations.
These comparisons underscore information breaches as a uniquely high-stakes context for evaluating the vulnerabilities and impression of information breaches applied sciences on a spread of key operational outcomes.
Breaches typically result in id theft, disruptions, regulatory fines, or a lot worse. For extra context, current incidents embody UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare breach affecting 100 million Americans and Ascension’s breach impacting 5.6 million people. Healthcare information can promote for as much as $1000 on the dark web, in comparison with $5 for bank card information.
Data breaches associated to delicate applied sciences will be bought in figures which can be simply in multiples of healthcare breaches.
This ought to give us pause.
Defence Procurement, Persuasion, and Trust
My analysis group can be investigating defence procurement and Business‑to‑Government (B2G) exchanges. Unlike usually environment friendly business markets, in defence-related settings patrons and sellers function in what some name much less environment friendly industrial markets. These B2B/B2G markets are characterised by uneven data, lengthy lead occasions, excessive transaction prices, and intense politico-economic uncertainty.
Using frameworks resembling Agency Theory and the Capability–Intent Matrix, we study defence procurement adoption and advertising and marketing of dual-use applied sciences. We examine how misalignment between governments (as principals) and companies (as brokers), particularly in twin‑use know-how adoption, ends in opportunistic habits resembling sanctions evasion.
Across a number of research, my collaborators and I run discipline experiments testing persuasion mechanisms, a closed-loop provide chain design, and a mix of graph and recreation theoretic fashions predicting sanctions evasion.
Through these research we purpose shine some daylight on procurement effectivity, alliance interoperability, sanctions enforcement, and know-how governance—elementary considerations at the coronary heart of how NATO members could navigate more and more advanced defence ecosystems.
AI, Integrity, and Civilian Spillovers
My analysis has additionally examined AI‑pushed markets, exploring contexts the place defence‑origin applied sciences sneak into well-liked civilian contexts. Some of our present work has targeted on trendy sports activities betting. One could marvel what trendy sports activities betting has to do with defence applied sciences? Well, these are dual-use know-how markets which have regularly seen anomaly detection, safety, and surveillance techniques spill over into consumption contexts. These applied sciences have been commercialized to section behaviors, personalize person concentrating on, predict wants and desires, and optimize worth by means of engagement.
These applied sciences have disrupted the degree enjoying discipline between companies and unsuspecting customers. Asymmetric energy in favor of platforms has triggered an arms race to control and possible hurt those that have been successfully persuaded to gamble away their final {dollars} for sports activities betting. But persuasion mechanisms can be redirected to scale back hurt. Democratic techniques should nudge themselves to leverage these cutting-edge applied sciences with out compromising belief, subverting autonomy, or devaluing legitimacy.
Retail, Commercialization, and Alliance Readiness
Another analysis stream we’re presently inspecting focuses on twin‑use applied sciences in retail and industrial markets. While retail and defence could appear poles aside, retail units the stage for large-scale deployment and serves as a proving floor for a lot of delicate applied sciences: AI, sensing, imaging, and logistics techniques. We’re learning these markets to not solely uncover the underlying phenomena but additionally make sense of the “construct” of dual-use know-how, which sadly (or shall I say, fortuitously) has largely stayed undefined in empirical settings. The Vaid Lab addresses this hole by creating frameworks and dashboards that map defence‑origin applied sciences to efficiency outcomes and regulatory constraints.
Methods: From Experiments to Synthetic Consumers
Methodologically, my lab emphasizes causal inference, discipline experiments, and superior analytics. We additionally study new experimentation paradigms to uncover underlying dual-use know-how phenomena by utilizing evolutionary coding brokers to validate artificial experience by means of a mixture of silicon sampling and Large Language Models. This manner we will generate personas, the place every persona is a vector of traits of hard-to-reach populations, say, defence procurement officers (patrons) in navy and authorities and sellers in industrial companies. The evolutionary coding pipeline makes use of more recent advances in health, mutation, and choice mechanisms to generate habits, metrics, and choice that may then be looped at scale.
Using evolutionary algorithm discovery, our examine of artificial personas goals to check hard-to-reach eventualities, ones which can be very tough to watch straight, resembling procurement negotiations.
Importantly, our work is just not carried out in isolation. The lab engages commonly with parliamentarians, researchers, corporations, policymakers, and public establishments, translating advanced analysis into actionable insights. Researchers and college students in the lab examine actual twin‑use companies throughout sectors resembling aerospace, cybersecurity, simulation, maritime techniques, and superior manufacturing, constructing sensible understanding of defence‑business dynamics.
Why This Matters for Canada, NATO, and Public Dialogue
The coming decade or two are essential for the world we name house. NATO-allied international locations (e.g., Japan, Korea), and companion democratic international locations (e.g., India) which can be main protection and strategic companions too have a lot at stake.
Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy and associated initiatives have to be seen not solely in the context of our “only” neighbor and closest ally, the United States, but additionally in the context of elevated defence cooperation with international locations like India. As Canada indicators large public outlays for defence (estimated at ~500 billion {dollars} over the subsequent decade) and seems to create 125k defence-related jobs, the function of advertising and marketing science in the procurement and commercialization of dual-use applied sciences throughout jurisdictions is ever extra necessary.
Most if not all roads to Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy go by means of Southern Ontario, house to a whole lot of defence‑succesful organizations. Yet, it’s now time to additionally settle for what we don’t know. Signaling funding alone is prone to have little bearing on success. As my present analysis exhibits, the key lies in adoption, belief, and public acceptance of these large initiatives.
This is exactly the place my analysis group and its work align with the mission of the NATO Association of Canada. NATO’s energy is derived from navy functionality, resilient economies, knowledgeable residents, and clear establishments. My present scholarship enhances belief between governments and society in dual-use know-how settings. By specializing in the advertising and marketing science of their adoption, governance, procurement and commercialization, my analysis brings “mil-grade” proof to alliance resilience.
That aim sits squarely at the intersection of the political economic system of advertising and marketing, dual-use know-how, and exogenous shocks, which is why I welcome engagement with the NATO Association of Canada.
Photo: Vaid Venn Diagram (June 4, 2026), by Dr. Sash Vaid by way of Claude Sonnet 4.6
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely these of the authors and don’t essentially symbolize the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
