Copyright
William Boone Bonvillian; Richard Van Atta; Patrick WindhamPublished On
2020-01-09ISBN
Language
- English
Print Length
508 pages (xx+488)Dimensions
Weight
Media
OCLC Number
1193020437LCCN
2019452963BIC
- KCP
- JP
- JPP
- TBX
BISAC
- TEC025000
- TEC056000
- POL063000
LCC
- U394.A75
Keywords
- U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- DARPA
- transformative technologies
- U.S. Government
- DARPA model
- Politics and Sociology
- Information Technology and Computer Science
- American and Latin American Studies
The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies
Perspectives on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- William Boone Bonvillian (editor)
- Richard Van Atta (editor)
- Patrick Windham (editor)
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet.
Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’?
This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.
Endorsements
The authors have done a masterful job of charting the important story of DARPA, one of the key catalysts of technological innovation in US recent history. By plotting the development, achievements and structure of the leading world agency of this kind, this book stimulates new thinking in the field of technological innovation with bearing on how to respond to climate change, pandemics, cyber security and other global problems of our time. The DARPA Model provides a useful guide for governmental agency and policy leaders, and for anybody interested in the role of governments in technological innovation.
Dr. Kent Hughes
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Additional Resources
Witness(es): William Bonvillian, Lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr Peter Highnam, Deputy Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Witness(es): Dr Antoine Petit, Chairman and CEO, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS); Dr Regina Dugan, Chief Executive Officer, Wellcome Leap.
Contents
1. Introduction: DARPA—The Innovation Icon
(pp. 1–26)- Patrick Windham
- Richard Van Atta
2. Fifty Years of Innovation and Discovery
(pp. 29–44)- Patrick Windham
- Richard Van Atta
- Michael J. Piore
- Phech Colatat
- Elisabeth Beck Reynolds
- William Boone Bonvillian
- Tamara L. Carleton
- Glenn R. Fong
7. Rethinking the Role of the State in Technology Development: DARPA and the Case for Embedded Network Governance
(pp. 179–228)- Glenn R. Fong
8. DARPA’s Process for Creating New Programs
(pp. 229–288)- David W. Cheney
- Richard Van Atta
9. Some Questions about the DARPA Model
(pp. 289–300)- Patrick Windham
10. DARPA—Enabling Technical Innovation
(pp. 303–314)- Jinendra Ranka
11. Program Management at DARPA: A Personal Perspective
(pp. 315–320)- Larry Jackel
- William Boone Bonvillian
- William Boone Bonvillian
- Richard Van Atta
14. IARPA: A Modified DARPA Innovation Model
(pp. 435–452)- William Boone Bonvillian
15. Does NIH need a DARPA?
(pp. 453–460)- Robert Cook-Deegan
16. Lessons from DARPA’s Experience
(pp. 463–470)- Richard Van Atta
- Patrick Windham
- William Boone Bonvillian
Contributors
William Boone Bonvillian
(editor)William B. Bonvillian is a Lecturer at MIT, and Senior Director at MIT's Office of Digital Learning, leading a project on workforce education. From 2006 until 2017, he was Director of MIT's Washington Office, supporting MIT's historic role in science policy. He teaches courses on innovation systems at MIT and is coauthor of three books on innovation, Advanced Manufacturing: The New American Innovation Policies (2018), Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors (2015), and Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (2009), as well as numerous articles. Previously he worked for over fifteen years on innovation issues as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and earlier was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation. He serves on the National Academies of Sciences' standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum and chairs the Committee on Science and Engineering Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was elected a Fellow of the AAAS in 2011. He has a BA from Columbia, an MAR from Yale and a JD from Columbia.
Richard Van Atta
(editor)Richard Van Atta's career has focused on the national security policy, strategy, and technological capabilities of the United States for the Department of Defense, chiefly for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) of the White House, and the Intelligence Community. From 1983 to his retirement in 2018, he was a senior research staff member of the Strategy, Forces and Resources Division (SF&RD), the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) and the Science and Technology Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), with a focus on innovation for national security. His work at IDA included assessments of the programs and development strategies of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). From 1993 to 1998, he served as Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Dual Use and Commercial Programs (on temporary assignment from IDA). He also was an adjunct faculty member in Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and the Science, Technology and International Affairs (STIA) program teaching courses on Emerging Technology and Security. Dr. Van Atta has a PhD in Political Science from Indiana University and a BA degree in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Patrick Windham
(editor)Patrick H. Windham is a Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University and a Partner with Technology Policy International, a consulting firm. In the past he has taught at the University of California's Washington, DC, center and the University of Maryland. From 1984 until 1997 he served as a Senior Professional Staff Member for the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the United States Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. He helped Senators oversee and draft legislation for several major civilian science and technology agencies and focused particularly on issues of science, technology, and U.S. industrial competitiveness. He has served on five committees and roundtables of the U.S. National Academies. Mr. Windham received a BA from Stanford University and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California at Berkeley.