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Shifting the impossible to the inevitable

blog.benjaminreinhardt.com · 85,866 words · saved by 3 readers

Looking to successful outliers from history is a good place to start. After digging into why DARPA works, I asked the follow-up question: how could you follow DARPA's narrow path in a world very different from the one that created it? This piece is my answer. It both describes and provides a roadmap to actualize a hybrid for/nonprofit organization that leverages empowered program managers and externalized research to shepherd technology that is too researchy for a startup and too engineering-heavy for academia; taking on work that other organizations can't or won't by precisely mapping out blockers to potentially game-changing technology, creating precise hypotheses about how to mitigate them, and then coordinating programs to execute on those plans. The proposal doesn't stand on its own — it needs a foundation of evidence and argument. This foundation spans many topics: from the role of value capture in technology creation to the now-defunct historical role of industrial labs, tactics

Shifting the impossible to the inevitable Shifting the impossible to the inevitable A Private ARPA user manual Ben Reinhardt April 2021 Download print-formatted PDF Introduction Who is this piece for? Preliminaries Purpose Housekeeping Institutional design is navigating an idea maze Part I: Problems and Possibilities - The Boundaries of the Maze and the Minotaurs Within Overlapping institutional constraints rule out several classes of creative work Feeling around the edges of solutions R&D In the past, industrial labs filled a particular niche in the innovation ecosystem Industrial labs enable

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