Getting the Most From New ARPAs

The Fall 2023 Issues included three articles—“No, We Don’t Need Another ARPA” by John Paschkewitz and Dan Patt, “Building a Culture of Risk-Taking” by Jennifer E. Gerbi, and “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Intelligible Failure” by Adam Russell—discussing several interesting dimensions of new civilian organizations modeled on the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Department of Defense. One dimension that could use further elucidation starts with the observation that ARPAs are meant to deliver innovative technology to be utilized by some end customer. The stated mission of the original DARPA is to bridge between “fundamental discoveries and their military use.” The mission of ARPA-H, the newest proposed formulation, is to “deliver … health solutions,” presumably to the US population.

When an ARPA is extraordinarily successful, it delivers an entirely new capability that can be adopted by its end customer. For example, DARPA delivered precursor technology (and prototype demonstrations) for stealth aircraft and GPS. Both were very successfully adopted.

Such adoption requires that the new capability coexist or operate within the existing processes, systems, and perhaps even culture of the customer. Understanding the very real constraints on adoption is best achieved when the ARPA organization has accurate insight into specific, high-priority needs, as well as the operations or lifestyle, of the customer. This requires more than expertise in the relevant technology.

DARPA uses several mechanisms to attain that insight: technology-savvy military officers take assignments in DARPA, then return to their military branch; military departments partner, via co-funding, on projects; and often the military evaluates a DARPA prototype to determine effectiveness. These relations with the end customer are facilitated because DARPA is housed in the same department as its military customer, the Department of Defense.

The health and energy ARPAs face a challenge: attaining comparable insight into their end customers. The Department of Health and Human Services does not deliver health solutions to the US population; the medical-industrial complex does. The Department of Energy does not deliver electric power or electrical appliances; the energy utilities and private industry do. ARPA-H and ARPA-E are organizationally removed from those end customers, both businesses (for profit or not) and the citizen consumer.

Technology advancement enables. But critical to innovating an adoptable solution is identification of the right problem, together with a clear understanding of the real-world constraints that will determine adoptability of the solution. Because civilian ARPAs are removed from many end customers, ARPAs would seem to need management processes and organizational structures that increase the probability of producing an adoptable solution from among the many alternative solutions that technology enables.

Anita Jones