Dear Readers, Brilliant Minds and Game-Changers,
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Imagine a company that owns an excellent quantum invention, employs a remarkable research team and has customers interested in its next system. Now imagine that it loses access to one essential component, one deployment environment or one body of technical support.
Its patents have not disappeared. Its scientific results remain valid. Yet its ability to deliver may have changed overnight.
That is the geopolitical question I would bring into a quantum boardroom. Not simply which nation will announce the most impressive machine, but which conditions allow a company to keep learning, building, selling and supporting its technology when the environment changes.
In my work as fractional Chief Intangible Assets Officer, especially for quantum companies worldwide, I see IP strategy as part of this wider question of strategic control.
The border that matters may not run around the company. It may run through its contracts, source code, research relationships and dependencies.
The race is also about the conditions of participation
Quantum policy already concerns more than laboratory performance. The European Commission's July 2025 Quantum Europe Strategy connects research with infrastructure, industrial development, supply-chain resilience, skills and security-related applications. Its stated ambition is a resilient, sovereign ecosystem, not merely a collection of impressive experiments.
Singapore's National Quantum Strategy similarly brings together scientific excellence, engineering capabilities, talent and enterprise partnerships. That programme reminds us that strategic participation need not mean trying to build every layer of an industry alone.
In the United States, DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative focuses on verifying whether proposed approaches could produce utility-scale quantum computing by 2033. This is another kind of influence: investing in the capacity to distinguish a plausible engineering path from an attractive claim.
These initiatives have different purposes and should not be collapsed into a single league table. Together, however, they suggest a broader strategic field. Research matters, but so do the institutions that shape infrastructure, trusted evidence, capital allocation and the conditions under which technology reaches users.
Distinguish ownership, access and autonomy
A company may own intellectual property without owning the facilities needed to manufacture the associated product. It may have access to a facility without controlling the terms under which that access continues. It may even own the equipment while depending on external software, maintenance or specialised expertise.
For strategy, I would distinguish three questions. What do we own? What are we permitted and able to use? What could we continue doing if a critical relationship changed? Calling all three "sovereignty" makes the discussion less precise.
My working definition of strategic autonomy is not self-sufficiency. It is the capacity to preserve meaningful choices under pressure. A company can be deeply international and still build that capacity. Conversely, a company with a domestic headquarters and domestic patents can remain operationally dependent on decisions made elsewhere.
This distinction has immediate consequences for intangible management. A licence, an interface specification, a repository of production knowledge or a transferable calibration process may matter as much to continuity as formal ownership of an invention. The question is how the entire capability remains usable, not whether one part can carry a national flag.
Export controls make knowledge movement a business issue
In September 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security announced controls covering specified quantum-computing and other advanced-technology items alongside international partners. Its current guidance also describes conditional exceptions for eligible items and destinations. Neither should be paraphrased as a blanket ban on quantum collaboration.
Switzerland's own export-control overview explicitly includes transfers of technology and intangible know-how within the wider control framework. For any real transaction, the applicable jurisdiction, classification, destination, end user, end use and available authorisation require a current, specific assessment.
The strategic implication is not that engineers should become trade lawyers. It is that cross-border plans should be reviewed before a business promises unrestricted delivery, technical access or joint development. A commercial team cannot safely assume that every deliverable is equivalent to an ordinary slide deck.
An NDA addresses confidentiality between parties. It does not itself provide a public-law authorisation to transfer controlled technology. Equally, keeping knowledge confidential does not automatically make it controlled. Those are different analyses, and the company needs a process that keeps them distinct.
Map the dependency, not merely the supplier
A supplier list is a useful starting point, but it can hide the most important dependencies. The company may have several vendors while all of them depend on the same upstream process. Two alternative components may exist, but substituting one may require an architecture redesign and a new validation campaign.
I would therefore map each strategically important capability against the resource it needs, the relevant rights, the organisation controlling access, the jurisdictional exposure and the realistic replacement path. The replacement path matters more than the comforting existence of another company in a directory.
For a hypothetical quantum business, the critical dependency might be a proprietary development environment. For another company, it might be fabrication expertise or customer data needed to demonstrate a use case. For a third, it could be the small team that knows how to integrate the system reliably.
The resulting map should not become a colourful picture without decisions. It should tell management where to negotiate continuity rights, document knowledge, qualify an alternative or accept exposure consciously. Some dependencies are entirely reasonable. The dangerous ones are those that nobody realised the strategy was relying on.
Standards and benchmarks influence access too
There is a quieter dimension of technological power: deciding what counts as credible performance. If buyers, funders and infrastructure operators use particular evaluation methods, companies must be able to explain their systems in those terms.
DARPA describes QBI as a staged verification and validation effort, rather than a competition between performers. The wider strategic inference is mine: institutions that build credible evaluation capacity can influence which technical claims receive serious attention. That is different from claiming that one programme will determine the winners of an entire industry.
For a company, the response should be to build evidence that travels. Can another qualified party understand the assumptions? Is the classical comparison appropriate? Are resource requirements visible? Are the conditions under which the result fails documented? Can important claims survive evaluation outside the sales presentation?
This is partly a technical capability and partly an intangible asset. Reproducible evidence, test procedures, documented limitations and trusted review relationships can reduce uncertainty for others. They do not guarantee adoption, but they make the company's proposition more legible across institutional boundaries.
Security has a different clock from commercial advantage
Quantum computing also creates a timing asymmetry. A business may conclude that a useful quantum application is not ready for its immediate needs while still needing to prepare information systems for future quantum-related threats.
NIST finalised its first three post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, covering key establishment and digital signatures, and encouraged migration planning. Post-quantum cryptography is not a quantum computer, and adopting it is not the same as purchasing quantum-communication hardware.
The management question is therefore not "Do we believe quantum is ready?" It is "Which decisions have to happen before a future capability arrives?" Information with a long confidentiality lifetime may deserve a different planning horizon from a short-lived operational record.
For intangible assets, this connects security architecture with the lifespan of valuable knowledge. A research archive, manufacturing method or strategic design may remain sensitive long after today's project has ended. The relevant discussion belongs between security, technical leadership, legal and business owners; it should not depend on a headline predicting a single arrival date.
International collaboration is part of resilience
It would be a mistake to turn this analysis into an argument for isolation. The European and Singaporean strategies both place substantial emphasis on ecosystems and the capabilities around research. A company that rejects every external dependency may sacrifice the relationships through which it learns and develops.
The better question is which dependencies create mutual strength and which create unilateral vulnerability. Can the company continue using results after a collaboration ends? Are responsibilities clear when regulations change? Does a partner have incentives to support continuity? Can general platform knowledge be retained without misusing another party's confidential information?
These questions support collaboration rather than treating it as a threat. They allow the parties to discuss difficult contingencies before anyone is under pressure. A credible continuity plan can be more reassuring than an unrealistic promise that the environment will remain stable.
Nor should security concerns become a shortcut for judging individuals by nationality. Technology classification, access requirements and lawful procedures should be handled precisely. Broad suspicion is a poor substitute for a sound process and can damage the talent and trust on which scientific work depends.
Three scenarios worth testing
For a practical strategy review, I would use three hypothetical disruptions. First, a critical component becomes unavailable for six months. Second, a prospective customer's procurement requirements exclude the current deployment architecture. Third, a research partner can no longer support an agreed technical workstream.
Do not begin by assigning speculative probabilities to each scenario. Begin by tracing the consequences. Which milestones slip? Which customer commitments are affected? Which knowledge remains available? Which contractual rights help? Which rights sound reassuring but cannot deliver an operational substitute?
Then identify a response that improves the position across more than one scenario. Better documentation might help with both supplier substitution and research continuity. A modular interface might preserve options in both deployment and sourcing. A clearer licence might reduce uncertainty in both investment diligence and commercial negotiations.
This is where geopolitical analysis becomes business strategy. It stops being a catalogue of distant events and becomes a small set of choices concerning architecture, knowledge retention, permissions and preparedness.
The exercise should also include cost. A second supplier that requires an unaffordable redesign is not a ready contingency. Full duplication of every capability may be less rational than securing one portable interface and preserving the knowledge needed to rebuild. Management should compare the cost of preparation with the consequences of interruption, rather than declaring every dependency unacceptable.
For an investor, the same exercise can improve diligence. Ask the company to explain one critical dependency and one credible alternative. Look for documented permissions, technical effort and a realistic transition time. A confident answer is useful only when the underlying plan can be examined. "We will find another partner" is a possibility, not yet a contingency.
What I would ask the board to decide
At the end of the review, I would want a short answer to four questions. Which capability must remain available for the business to function? Where is its most important external dependency? What feasible alternative are we preserving? What trigger would make us act before the disruption becomes irreversible?
The answer may be to invest in an alternative, negotiate a right, change an interface or deliberately retain the present arrangement. Not every risk justifies expensive duplication. But every central dependency deserves an explicit decision.
Quantum geopolitics is therefore not only a contest over who develops a powerful machine. It is also a contest over who can sustain the knowledge, access and relationships needed to participate in the industry on viable terms.
Your patent portfolio matters. So does the ability to use it in a world that does not stand still.
The strategic question is not simply which country your company belongs to.
It is how many of your future choices remain genuinely yours.
