Europe’s defence-industrial expansion increasingly depends on technologies that do not originate inside conventional defence supply chains. Integrated photonics, quantum sensing and advanced semiconductor processes move through universities, research and technology organisations, pilot lines, design houses, foundries, software vendors, specialist laboratories and start-ups long before they become components of deployable systems. For an international company seeking a substantive industrial position in Europe, and for the authorities that must judge whether such a position strengthens or hollows out the continent’s capability, the problem is therefore not how to identify promising research organisations or join collaborative projects. It is how a relationship with them becomes durable access to people, processes, intellectual property, equipment, qualified production and customers, while preserving the conditions under which the resulting capability can be financed, controlled and used in Europe. A project affiliation, a European subsidiary or a university collaboration can establish a relationship; none of them establishes industrial capability. The question that follows is narrower than the language of ecosystem policy usually allows: under what verifiable conditions does participation in European research networks convert into industrial capacity, and what does the public record permit an outside observer to establish about that conversion?