Edgewing, the tri-national joint venture designing the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) fighter, gathered more than 160 participants at OGR Tech in Turin, Italy, this week for an event dedicated to its Forge innovation project, the company announced on November 13, 2026. The audience included some 75 startups alongside investors, industry clusters, research centers and companies from across the Italian innovation ecosystem.

Forge is a digital technology engagement and adoption project launched in July 2026 at the Farnborough International Airshow. It is designed to identify innovation and act as a bridge to bring it into GCAP, the program through which Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom are developing a sixth-generation combat aircraft targeted for service entry in 2035. The Turin event comes four months after the GCAP Agency awarded Edgewing a £4.6 billion contract on July 3, 2026, covering completion of the concept and assessment phase and further detailed design and development through the end of 2027.

Edgewing Forge Turin Event Pairs 20 Firms With GCAP Challenges

Edgewing is owned in equal shares by BAE Systems of the UK, Leonardo of Italy and Japan Aircraft Industrial Enhancement Co. Ltd. (JAIEC). Headquartered in the UK, the company operates in all three partner nations, and its Italian site is based in Turin.

The morning session featured Edgewing leadership and the GCAP Agency, which delivers the program on behalf of the three governments. The afternoon was dedicated to structured one-to-one matchmaking between the Forge team and 20 pre-selected companies spread across the project’s four challenge areas.

“Since we launched the Forge project in July, Italian industry has responded strongly to the challenges we set,” said Giuseppe Lupoli, General Manager of Edgewing in Italy.

Since launch, the Forge website has drawn interest from more than 90 companies across Italy, Japan and the UK. Applications are being assessed against the published Challenge Statements, and the Forge team is working toward its first collaborative project. Selected firms will be supported in becoming defense-ready.

Twelve Challenge Statements Target GCAP Engineering and Supply Chain

The 12 Challenge Statements published at launch remain open to applications. None addresses the airframe, propulsion or mission systems directly; the focus is the digital enterprise that will design and build the aircraft. The statements are grouped into four areas:

  • Engineering: continuous, automated assurance and compliance, intelligent digital tools to accelerate engineering decisions and trade-off evaluations, and a connected engineering environment across the program lifecycle.
  • Program Management: earlier risk identification and forecasting, shared visibility on dependencies across organizations and suppliers, and scenario exploration before committing time and cost.
  • Supply Chain: real-time visibility into supplier performance, simplified procurement governance, and joint planning across partner nations.
  • Multinational Collaboration: secure collaboration across organizations, nations and security domains, trusted and secure information for faster decisions, and interoperable digital ecosystems.

General Alessandro Pellegrini, head of the Digital and Infrastructure Division at the GCAP International Government Organisation (GIGO), said engineering companies “with the right skills and disruptive ideas are more than welcome” to join the international GCAP team.

Analysis: Forge targets one of the program’s least visible but most schedule-critical risks: tri-national coordination. A 2035 in-service date for a sixth-generation fighter developed across three nations and three national security regimes leaves little margin for friction in design reviews, information sharing and supplier management. By framing its first challenges around cross-domain collaboration, digital assurance and supply chain visibility rather than hardware, Edgewing is treating program management as a capability in its own right. The approach also opens a route into GCAP for Italian firms outside the established aerospace supply chain, which could broaden the national industrial footprint on the program.

A similar Forge summit will be held in Japan. Edgewing says the first collaborative projects will begin before the end of 2026, and its Forge project page plans full tri-national operations from January 2027, with a target of five to ten strategic partnerships per year. Fabio Russo, Senior Innovation Manager and Digital Forge Lead at Edgewing, said the focus is now on “turning that enthusiasm into tangible collaborations.” Edgewing has not disclosed the funding available to Forge partners, the contractual vehicle for selected firms, or how intellectual property generated under the project will be managed across the three nations.