Over the past 50 years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an unparalleled number of breakthroughs. Arguably, it has the longest-standing, most consistent track record of radical invention in history. Its innovations include the internet; RISC computing; global positioning satellites; stealth technology; unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones”; and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), which are now used in everything from air bags to ink-jet printers to video games like the Wii. Though the U.S. military was the original customer for DARPA’s applications, the agency’s advances have played a central role in creating a host of multibillion-dollar industries.
What makes DARPA’s long list of accomplishments even more impressive is the agency’s swiftness, relatively tiny organization, and comparatively modest budget. Its programs last, on average, only three to five years. About 100 temporary technical program managers and a vibrant mix of contract “performers”—individuals or teams drawn from universities, companies of all sizes, labs, government partners, and nonprofits—do the project work. The support staff comprises only 120 people in finance, contracting, HR, security, and legal. The annual budget for the roughly 200 programs that are under way at any given time is about $3 billion. With its unconventional approach, speed, and effectiveness, DARPA has created a “special forces” model of innovation.
Not surprisingly, in recent decades there have been many attempts to apply the DARPA model in other organizations in the private and public sectors. All those efforts—or at least the ones with which we’re familiar—have had mixed results or failed. These disappointments have led people to conclude that the successes of this extraordinary agency simply can’t be replicated outside the Department of Defense.
We disagree. We led DARPA from mid-2009 until mid-2012. Since then, we have been implementing the agency’s model of innovation in a new organization—the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group at Motorola Mobility, which was acquired by Google in May 2012. We believe that the past efforts failed because the critical and mutually reinforcing elements of the DARPA model were not understood, and as a result, only some of them were adopted. Our purpose is to demonstrate that DARPA’s approach to breakthrough innovation is a viable and compelling alternative to the traditional models common in large, captive research organizations.
The DARPA model has three elements:
Ambitious goals. The agency’s projects are designed to harness science and engineering advances to solve real-world problems or create new opportunities. At Defense, GPS was an example of the former and stealth technology of the latter. The problems must be sufficiently challenging that they cannot be solved without pushing or catalyzing the science. The presence of an urgent need for an application creates focus and inspires greater genius.
Temporary project teams. DARPA brings together world-class experts from industry and academia to work on projects of relatively short duration. Team members are organized and led by fixed-term technical managers, who themselves are accomplished in their fields and possess exceptional leadership skills. These projects are not open-ended research programs. Their intensity, sharp focus, and finite time frame make them attractive to the highest-caliber talent, and the nature of the challenge inspires unusual levels of collaboration. In other words, the projects get great people to tackle great problems with other great people.
Independence. By charter, DARPA has autonomy in selecting and running projects. Such independence allows the organization to move fast and take bold risks and helps it persuade the best and brightest to join.
first appeared on hbr.org
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