Reducing the Time from Basic Research to Innovation in the Chemical Sciences A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2003) / Chapter Skim
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4. DARPA's Approach to Innovation and Its Reflection in Industry
4. DARPA's Approach to Innovation and Its Reflection in Industry
Pages 37-48
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From page 37... ...
Prior to that, he spent 7 years at DARPA, finishing his tenure there as director of the Defense Sciences Office, which is responsible for an annual investment of approximately $300 million toward the development of technologies for biological warfare defense, biology, defense applications of advanced mathematics, and materials and devices for new military capabilities.
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From page 38... ...
Each project is managed by a proactive program manager, and quality performance is rewarded with increased funding. In order to accomplish this, DARPA has highly flexible contracting and hiring practices that are atypical of most of the federal government.
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From page 39... ...
Thus, DARPA technical staff work closely with business/ industry leaders and department acquisition officials to ensure a market pull for the technology. Transitioning a research program into a long-term funding opportunity for the same group of contractors by another government agency is not the preferred exit strategy.
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From page 40... ...
In this case, research by competing individuals working in isolation leads to a vast array of potential technologies and discoveries, only a fraction of which are ever combined to form useful new products and/or processes (see Figure 4.1~. Most published papers sit idle in the archival literature with few, if any, references.
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From page 41... ...
Basic research, applied research, and development and demonstration play a role at all levels in the process since there is a tight feedback loop between discovery, whether planned or serendipity, and end use. Frequent contact between technology developers and technology users, with the DARPA program manager playing the role of "technology midwife" at times, ensures that useful discoveries will move more rapidly from the research laboratory into the marketplace.
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From page 42... ...
In this case, there are typically a handful of established players in the market and generally the barriers to entry are high. Alternatively, if development of a revolutionary technology creates a new complementary product opportunity, licensing may also be the most appropriate method of bringing an innovation to market.
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From page 43... ...
Venture capitalists typically want a very large opportunity, for which a company can be valued at greater than $100 million in less than 5 years and for which significant market share is possible. They expect a return on investment of 30 to 40 percent per year and breakeven in a reasonable time.
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From page 44... ...
As ideas mature, SRI has developed an online Business Development "Cookbook," a how-to guide to move technology into the marketplace and to build relationships with government and commercial clients. The SRI Internal Ventures and Licensing Board reviews, evaluates, and nurtures emerging business opportunities and provides a forum where business leaders can supply feedback on emerging technologies and markets.
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From page 45... ...
They can also control micro- and nanostructures to improve ballistic protection, develop new therapeutics to counter the effects of emerging chemical and biological warfare agents, and develop self-healing materials to repair our aging platforms. These are but a few of many possible important problems in the defense arena where chemists can not only perform great, intellectually challenging science but also make a real impact on people's lives.
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From page 46... ...
The funding agency must support teaming and the effective use of scarce experimental resources through, for example, partnerships with national labs, not-for-profit organizations, and commercial companies. The government should encourage the use of corporate or individual donations of funds and equipment to tie the public and private sectors closer together and to enhance the training of students in state-of-the-art facilities.
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From page 47... ...
Finally, from a programmatic standpoint, one of the critically important procedures we used in the Defense Sciences Office of DARPA was that when we hired a new program manager we did not let him or her run programs in their area of expertise. For example, if someone is an expert in semiconductor processing, they were not running programs in semiconductor processing.
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From page 48... ...
First, the Defense Sciences Office was very different from most other offices, partly due to the kind of people we hired. We brought in a much more technically diverse group of people than any other office.
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