§PARPA

How does money work in PARPA?

Dinner 21 May 2021

Employee-ownership could enable PARPA to align long-term incentives

Matt Krisiloff

PARPAs ideal legal structure comprises both a nonprofit and a for profit

There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing

DARPA's Approach to Innovation and Its Reflection in Industry

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

ICT Outline

# Could DARPA have a positive return?
*Spoiler alert - I suspect the answer is no, given any currently existing value capture mechanism*

[[Profit is important for both practical and ideological reasons]]. A big reason that it’s important is that it allows institutions to be self-sustaining. In steady state, could an organization riffing off of DARPA sustain itself or would it constantly need external money? 

It’s not an unreasonable question - technology eventually needs to be commercialized and diffused in order to actually impact people’s lives, which means that eventually it will end up as products on the market. However, it’s entirely possible that the product is so many steps removed from the people who created the original technology that you can barely see the connection, let along propagate value backwards. 

Figuring out which assumptions to use is tricky because [[DARPA doesn’t do any research in house]], so all research they fund was ultimately done by another organization and there isn’t a clear value capture mechanism. Additionally [[There is a significant class of innovations that would create drastically less value for the world if their value had been captured by their creators]].  On top of all of that, valuable things that can be traced back to DARPA-funded work are usually combined with a lot of other work. This research admixture is important because it means that a fixed % capture is not a good assumption because it would surely have a damping effect, while trying to figure out what % you can attribute to DARPA sponsored research might be near impossible. [[We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit]]. 

Given these hurdles, it seems important to first ask “how much monetary value has DARPA spent and created?” And then to ask “given different scenarios, how much of that could have been fed back and what would have been the effects?” 

Even answering the former question is hard because DARPA is rarely the first or last organization to touch a project *and* it’s unclear how much their help contributed. For the sake of accounting, I’ll also only pay attention to inventions that did capture value and are directly traceable to DARPA. This approach will put the estimate on the extreme low-end. If an organization could be 

There are several different scenarios for figuring out how much money DARPA could have captured. 
1. Fixed % of any related patent  (ie licensing) 
2. Fixed fee on any company that could be traced back
3. Some kind of tithing mechanism
4. Has an option to invest in priced rounds for technology that came out 

Based on the amount of money that universities are able to pull in through licensing fees, #1 is probably untenable. [[Licensing is a bad primary income strategy for PARPA]].



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Lawrence (Larry) Dubois

# DARPA's Approach to Innovation and Its Reflection in Industry
`Innovation is more than invention - it is invention turned into practice and it requires a fundamental change in operations`
![](BearImages/2449A1DB-9EC8-4DF5-9188-7248DBB20488-98199-000C45E289661D0B/BFEDA996-FE04-4FB8-886A-68A6554811D0.png)
- Every program needs an exit strategy
![](BearImages/09E3F6BF-A090-47DB-80BE-4C4E98F6A8F2-98199-000C45E95550266E/00A91BFC-1576-43B8-8CC8-2BE0A337A040.png)
![](BearImages/A6A1EBE6-336E-40F5-885E-2BACC41CB218-98199-000C45EB7493EF30/B92157A5-B9E0-47BB-BF63-4CABC474F60A.png)
![](BearImages/6839601B-290D-49A7-A4A7-BED8AC76CD9D-98199-000C45EDC3337213/7246B095-9844-4FF4-9E38-28448173C070.png)
- [[Make living documents]]
![](BearImages/D69A874A-033B-4D09-8150-2E462F88F0F4-98199-000C45F1A83E1C01/9BE615E2-CC56-4EC8-A186-11351711CE33.png)
![](BearImages/021094F8-AB22-409A-855E-7490B7CEAE8A-98199-000C45F6DCC906E8/CF4217CC-B5CD-4017-85B4-95E38137A05B.png)
- ::is there a way of prioiritizing these things?::
![](BearImages/D75D2469-7F61-49AA-AF3F-7A8CE3C1B0FE-98199-000C4601806F5493/8AD26572-794F-4139-BE2C-6643CF18EDD4.png)
![](BearImages/12251D62-6E6D-443C-A32D-BDEA706938C1-98199-000C4605063D0339/3C81BD31-CC93-4A84-9462-FBB60703C6D5.png)
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]
- SRI uses NABCs to determine whether work is worthwhile:
	- Need - from customer client or market
	- Approach
	- Benefits
	- Competition
- ::Could SRI be self sustaining?:: is perhaps a better question than [[Could DARPA have a positive return?]]
### Published
2003
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Lawrence (Larry) Dubois]]
## Link



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§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics

arthurNatureTechnologyWhat2009

strevensKnowledgeMachineHow2020

Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things

Most human knowledge is not encoded

New ideas need to come out of a single mind

APM Roadmap

Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

Program design is like creating the lego instruction book

Researchers are more important than the research

In order to extend a heuretic it must be legible to you

Boris Hanin conversation 30 Aug 2021

James Cooper conversation 7 Sep 2021

You need a human to resolve conflicting information

The affordance of a heuretic dictates how it can connect with another node on the tech tree

Many approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans

Most approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans

Roadmaps need to be coupled to people

The most important role of program design is to build a shared context and connectivity between stakeholders

Kumar Garg conversation 18 Nov 2021

Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction

Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans\*

In a positivistic world knowledge just keeps growing

Understanding the edge of knowledge is a human endeavor

# Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)
TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE rests on three arguments:
1. [[Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans*]]
2. [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]]
3. [[Brains are wombs for heuretics]]

#### Why is this not naval-gazing?   
- [[Many approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans]] - this is why they are built on shaky assumptions.
- Any model of technological development that ignores humans is limited
- Incentives matter
- [[Researchers are more important than the research]]
- Realizing that [[Most human knowledge is not encoded]] is important
- [[You need a human to resolve conflicting information]]
- If you ignore that technology is people, you give up a lot of control authority over how technology evolves.  ([[What does technological genetic engineering look like?]], [[What does technological husbandry look like?]])

### Related



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Life Style Guide

Design for roadmapping system

Gantt Chart

Most roadmaps suck

Plans can change in a definite worldview

Enabling Mission Impact - Funding Strategies for High-Risk High-Reward Innovation

Principles for Innovation Orgs

Program design creates Schelling points for purpose maintenance

Stephen Malina email 12 Sep 2020

L case study on roadmapping

# Make living documents
[[Plans can change in a definite worldview]] - the only way to both have a plan and allow it to change without starting from scratch is to have a living document. 

Originally part of [[Gantt Chart]] 

But might just be a useful principle for [[Life Style Guide]]



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