At the age of 50, it's time for DARPA to rethink its future.

• Author: Parker, John Paul
• Position: VIEWPOINT

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency just celebrated its 50th anniversary. DARPA has been heralded as a model of what can be right about government.

The agency's challenges, however, are about to get a lot harder now that the post 9/11 spending spree is over and budgets are expected to decline.

To thrive in this new era, DARPA will have to experiment with a new business model for achieving innovation.

DARPA is famous for inventing revolutionary new capabilities. ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, is perhaps the most famous. But the business model for DARPA to get technologies out of the lab and into the hands of the end user has been remarkably non-innovative. According to the agency's charter, it is not the role of the organization to produce technology that directly addresses a military need.

The traditional approach is for DARPA to produce a potential breakthrough technical capability and then rely on market forces to return that innovation to the military. The development of the Internet is an example of how this traditionally works. The feasibility of networking multiple computers was pioneered by DARPA in 1969, but it would take the commercial adoption of the World Wide Web in the 1990s to make the Internet a useful tool for either civilian or military use.

And that's the problem with the passive, market-driven model of technology adoption: Sometimes it takes a long time to catch on, or evolve in a way not envisioned by the creators.

Responding to Pentagon complaints that technology transition was taking too long, when it happened at all, DARPA shifted over the past eight years to a more active, albeit bureaucratic, model of technology transition. DARPA program managers were expected to seek out and obtain advocacy from the military for their projects, or else their funding was in jeopardy. The Holy Grail became a memorandum of agreement, a quasi-legal document between DARPA and a military customer that specifies the details of how technology will transition--should the research bear fruit--to a formal military program.

DARPA has garnered credit for many technology success stories that have made a difference in current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But critics of the agency have increasingly complained that DARPA has sacrificed its mission of long-term pioneering research in order to emphasize near-term technology transition.

Critics note that requiring that DARPA program managers secure technology transition...