How to Fund Mad Scientists: Evaluating the Landscape for Public High-Risk

States are racing to build public organizations to fund breakthrough science and technology. Increasingly, states have turned to the example of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a guiding template. Where such organizations need to pursue risky innovation, the organizational model often needs to be more defensible, with DARPA being infamously known for early-stage funding related to internet development, miniaturization of GPS, unmanned drones, autonomous vehicles, speech recognition technologies, brain-computer interfaces, among other areas. 

This talk will dive into the current global landscape of public high-risk efforts, focusing on the diffusion of the DARPA model in the USA and internationally. The talk will be focused on three dimensions: first, how has the global landscape of high-risk funding evolved; second, what functions these agencies are playing for governments; third, what challenges facing the future of such models.