Mauritz Kop Principal Investigator of MINDS Quantum Strategy Grant at CIGI

Waterloo, February 18, 2026—The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) has awarded Mauritz Kop a new leadership role as Principal Investigator of a MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant on Quantum Strategy. The grant advances a central proposition of his recent work: quantum technologies are no longer best understood as a narrow scientific frontier or a conventional innovation file. They have become a strategic domain in which law, industrial policy, intellectual property, defense planning, and geopolitical competition now converge.

That convergence matters because quantum capability is being built in an era of systemic rivalry, supply-chain vulnerability, and technological coercion. In that environment, democratic states cannot afford to treat quantum merely as a research ecosystem problem. They must govern it as part of a broader strategy for safeguarding the democratic industrial commons: the shared base of talent, infrastructure, know-how, trusted supply chains, standards, and institutions on which long-run security, prosperity, and coalition advantage depend.

CIGI is an excellent platform for this project. It is an independent, non-partisan think tank whose peer-reviewed research, foresight, and trusted analysis are designed to inform policy on transformative technologies and governance. Kop serves there as a Senior Fellow—complementing his work at Stanford RQT—and this Principal Investigator role extends that fellowship from high-level analysis into direct policy-facing implementation, strategic convening, and next-generation capacity building.

Mauritz Kop Principal Investigator of MINDS Quantum Strategy Grant at CIGI

What MINDS in Defence and Security Is and Why This Grant Fits

The MINDS program—Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security—is a Canadian Department of National Defence initiative designed to strengthen evidence-based defense policy thinking and foster the next generation of defense and security experts. Its Targeted Engagement Grants provide non-recurring support of up to CAD 50,000 for projects such as workshops, roundtables, research, and publications, and they are assessed primarily against the annual Defence Policy Challenges.

The current 2025-26 MINDS challenge set is especially well aligned with the subject matter of this grant. The official challenge framework emphasizes several critical priorities: securing Canada’s sovereignty and continental defense posture; attracting advanced-technology talent across the defense sector; and strengthening the defense industrial base through resilient supply chains and dual-use technologies such as quantum and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the framework addresses the pressures of strategic competition—including adversarial exploitation of vulnerabilities—and the accelerating adoption of pan-domain, emerging technologies where interoperability, trust, and responsible governance must be preserved.

This is precisely the terrain in which quantum strategy now sits. It is not only about scientific leadership; it is about whether Canada and its allies can convert research excellence into secure capability, credible deterrence, trusted markets, and sovereign industrial resilience without collapsing into either dependency or indiscriminate restriction.

Strategic Leadership and Human Capital

Kop’s fellowship at CIGI has centered on the governance of transformative technologies, especially quantum technology, AI, dual-use export controls, national security, and intellectual property. The new grant builds directly on that portfolio, but with a more operational mandate. As Principal Investigator, his role is to provide the project’s strategic and intellectual leadership: conceptualizing the workshop, defining the central themes and policy questions, structuring the panels for direct relevance to Canadian defense audiences, chairing the main event, moderating key expert sessions, identifying high-level contributors, and guiding the project’s analytical outputs.

The engagement also includes a deliberate human-capital component. In addition to chairing the workshop, Kop will deliver a masterclass for CIGI students and research associates and mentor a cohort of emerging Canadian scholars. That design is strategically important. A serious quantum strategy requires more than isolated publications; it requires institutions that can reproduce expertise, cultivate judgment, and train analysts capable of navigating the interface between frontier science, industrial policy, legal architecture, and national security.

The Quantum Nexus Paper Behind the Grant

The grant builds on Kop’s recent paper, The Nexus of Quantum Technology, Intellectual Property, and National Security: An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, now available on arXiv.

In that paper, he argues that quantum technologies have moved from laboratory structures to the geopolitical stage, and that democratic states therefore need a governance model that is neither naively open nor reflexively protectionist. The paper's contribution is an implementable coalition playbook, offering empirically anchored criteria, templates, and differentiated guardrails - including red zone domains where denial is the default - to avoid both over-securitization and under-securitization. Properly applied, LSI reduces the risk of a self-defeating hard decoupling from China while establishing standards-first interoperability as a stabilizing eigenstate of the international order and enabling RQT by design to shape trusted adoption pathways beyond the coalition, including in the majority world.

The paper’s core insight is that quantum governance should be organized around a nexus rather than a silo. Innovation policy, intellectual property, research security, export controls, procurement, standards, supply chains, and alliance coordination are often treated as separate policy boxes. The Nexus framework rejects that fragmentation. It treats them as interacting levers in a single strategic system. In practical terms, this means that decisions about publication, patenting, secrecy, licensing, investment screening, trusted collaboration, and capability development must be assessed together rather than one instrument at a time. For the United States, mastering this nexus is essential to maintaining technological primacy, securing critical defense supply chains against geopolitical adversaries, and coordinating export controls seamlessly across allied ecosystems.

This is especially important in quantum because value and vulnerability are distributed across the stack. The strategic issue is not only a future fault-tolerant quantum computer; it is also the surrounding ecosystem of enabling hardware, materials, cryogenics, photonics, software, standards, talent, tacit knowledge, testing infrastructure, and cryptographic transition. A governance failure at any of those layers can erode sovereign capability or accelerate adversarial advantage. The Nexus framework is therefore a blueprint for strategic stability: it asks how states can preserve scientific dynamism while protecting the key nodes of capability that underpin coalition security and the democratic industrial commons.

The LSI Test: Security-Sufficient Openness

At the center of the Nexus paper is the LSI test: least-trade-restrictive, security-sufficient, and innovation-preserving. The purpose of the test is to discipline both public and private decision-making in dual-use quantum domains. Rather than asking whether a system should be fully open or fully closed, the LSI approach asks a more calibrated question: what is the narrowest intervention that is still sufficient to protect security, while preserving as much legitimate innovation, collaboration, and market dynamism as possible?

That framing matters strategically. A state can under-secure critical technologies and permit preventable leakage, dependency, or coercive exposure. But it can also over-secure them, fragmenting allied innovation ecosystems, chilling investment, and producing what the paper calls a self-defeating “Silicon Curtain.” The LSI test is meant to avoid both errors. It operationalizes security-sufficient openness by creating differentiated guardrails, including higher-assurance closed-loop collaboration for high-sensitivity work and default denial for a narrow set of red-zone domains where disclosure or transfer would predictably accelerate adversarial capability.

In that sense, LSI is not a slogan about “balance.” It is a decision rule for democratic technological statecraft. It links legal doctrine, industrial strategy, and alliance management into an implementable governance method. It also reframes intellectual property as part of national capability architecture: a tool not only for commercialization, but for structuring disclosure, preserving strategic optionality, allocating control rights, and supporting trusted innovation pathways.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) has awarded Mauritz Kop a new leadership role as Principal Investigator of a MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant on Quantum Strategy.

From Quantum Ethics to Geopolitics

The grant also connects to a broader strand of Kop’s recent work on quantum ethics under strategic conditions. In the Harvard Petrie-Flom essay “Hippocratic Quantum: The Ethics of Biomedical Discovery in the Quantum Age,” the analysis extends these questions into quantum-enabled biomedical discovery, emphasizing that enduring ethical duties must now be operationalized under novel technical and geopolitical conditions. As the underlying research illustrates, this approach directly applies the LSI test and tiered-disclosure logic in the biomedical context.

That link between quantum ethics and geopolitics is important because it shows that the Nexus framework is not confined to abstract national-security theory; it scales across sectors. Whether the domain is cryptography, sensing, supply chains, or biomedical discovery, the same strategic question recurs: how should democratic societies govern powerful dual-use capabilities so that beneficial research and deployment can proceed without creating avoidable pathways for coercion, misuse, or authoritarian capture?

Why This Matters for Canada, America, and the Democratic Industrial Commons

For Canada, the significance of this project is straightforward. Quantum strategy cannot stop at innovation rhetoric. A country may have strong researchers, promising start-ups, and high-quality institutions, yet still lose strategic position if it lacks a coherent framework for IP management, PQC migration, trusted supply chains, procurement alignment, and allied interoperability. The Canadian challenge is therefore not only how to support discovery, but how to convert discovery into durable strategic advantage.

That is where this MINDS grant becomes substantively important. It moves the conversation from general support for “responsible quantum” toward concrete policy instrumentation. It will translate advanced scholarship into a usable toolkit for Canadian defense and security stakeholders facing urgent questions about post-quantum cryptography, sensitive knowledge governance, industrial resilience, and the design of a sovereign, trusted, and alliance-compatible quantum ecosystem.

In strategic terms, the project is about more than risk mitigation. It is about preserving room for democratic states to innovate from a position of security rather than dependency. For the United States and the broader democratic world, coordinating this governance architecture is essential to sustain collective technological leadership and shield shared supply chains from geopolitical weaponization. It is about ensuring that quantum advantage does not migrate by default to the jurisdictions most willing to fuse state power, industrial capacity, and coercive control. And it is about demonstrating that the democratic industrial commons can be defended without abandoning openness altogether—through sharper institutional design, more disciplined legal architecture, and a clearer theory of trusted technological power.

A Substantive Step Toward Operational Quantum Governance

This MINDS grant is therefore best understood as a substantive step toward operational quantum governance. It takes a landmark CIGI-sponsored research agenda on the nexus of quantum technology, IP, and national security and converts it into a policy-facing engagement with direct relevance for Canadian strategic planning. In doing so, it contributes to a more serious model of quantum statecraft: one oriented not merely toward invention, but toward safeguarding the democratic industrial commons, strengthening sovereign capability, and securing trusted advantage in a contested technological order.