"Special Forces" Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems

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. 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. 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.