ARPA's early decades of success have made the ARPA model iconic. Big wins from ARPA’s early history include autonomous vehicles, the internet, a

A Scrappy Complement to FROs: Building More BBNs

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2024-10-16 12:00:04

ARPA's early decades of success have made the ARPA model iconic. Big wins from ARPA’s early history include autonomous vehicles, the internet, and stealth aircraft technology. Inspired by these successes, scientific grant funders are increasingly emulating the ARPA PM approach to R&D funding. While I wholly support the proliferation of the ARPA model, it's important to not overlook a key lesson of ARPA history: many exceptional ARPA projects resulted from exceptional contractors.

By "exceptional," I mean contractor groups who were not just staffed with elite talent, but uniquely aligned with ARPA's mission. All three aforementioned ARPA success stories had contractors — which DARPA calls performers — that shared three distinct traits, rarely found together. Each performer:

Built useful technology for actual users. This entailed professional contract management and a willingness to focus on difficult systems engineering tasks.