Towards a Polish Dual-Tech Nation Strategy

A successful convergence. Poland has largely achieved income convergence and built a robust industrial core. Foreign capital, integration into European value chains and cost competitiveness delivered one of the fastest economic transformations in modern European history.

A country at a bifurcation point. Poland is now entering a different stage of development. As wages converge towards Western European levels, its cost advantage narrows and the returns from factor-driven growth gradually diminish. Further convergence must increasingly rely on innovation-led productivity, intellectual property and technological ownership. The relevant risk is no longer a middle-income trap, but a middle-technology plateau in which income convergence is not matched by equivalent control over technologies, products and high-value functions.Poland enters this transition with considerable strengths: strategic centrality on NATO’s eastern flank, a strong engineering and industrial base, substantial household savings and exceptional public financing capacity, including through the EU’s SAFE instrument.

The procurement paradox. Poland devotes 4.48% of GDP to defence, one of the highest shares in NATO, and accounted for 16% of the increase in EU27 military expenditure between 2022 and 2025. Post-2022 urgency rightly favoured proven allied systems, but this exceptional demand has not yet created a repeatable first-customer and scale-up pathway for Polish dual-tech firms. None of the six European defence-technology companies valued above USD 1 billion in the report’s selected cohort is Polish, while disclosed defence-technology venture funding across Central and Eastern Europe since 2019 amounts to approximately USD 90 million, compared with USD 2 billion in Germany.

The industrial paradox. Poland has preserved a substantial industrial base and developed strong engineering capabilities. These strengths supported convergence and made the country a major component of European value chains, but they have not yet translated into comparable ownership of intellectual property, product roadmaps, high-value technological functions and globally scalable technology companies.

The capital paradox. Poland has substantial household savings, abundant public development capital and functioning investment platforms. Yet its domestic institutional LP base remains comparatively shallow: household claims on investment funds, insurance and pension schemes amount to only 16.6% of GDP. Capital therefore becomes scarce precisely when technology companies approach scale and require larger, successive financing rounds.

Taken together, the three paradoxes reveal the same missing link: an institutional architecture capable of converting operational demand, research, industrial capability and long-term capital into scalable, domestically anchored dual-use technology companies.

The strategy. Twenty sequenced measures designed to build delivery capacity from day one, establish first-customer pathways, mobilise international institutional capital early and progressively deepen Poland’s domestic investor base as evidence accumulates. Seventeen can begin using existing powers.

The ambition. To convert Poland’s industrial and geopolitical weight into technological ownership and establish the country as Europe’s leading Dual-Tech Nation.