In this conversation I talk to the Amazing Arati Prabhakar about using Solutions R&D to tackle big societal problems, gaps in the innovation ecosystem, DARPA, and more.

Arati's career has covered almost every corner of the innovation ecosystem - she's done basically every role at - DARPA she was a program manager, started their Microelectronics Technology Office, and several years later returned to server as its Director. She was also the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and was a venture capitalist at US venture partners. Now she's launching Actuate - a non-profit leveraging the ARPA model to go after some of the biggest problems in American society.

Links

Actuate Website

In the Realm of the Barely Feasible - Arati's Article about Actuate and Solutions R&D

Arati on Wikipedia 

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] welcome to idea machines. I'm your host and Reinhart. And this podcast is a deep dive into the systems and people that bring innovations from glimmers in someone's eye, all the way to tools, processes, and ideas that can shift paradigms. We see these systems outputs everywhere, but what's inside the black boxes with guests.

I dig below the surface into crucial, but often unspoken questions. To explore themes of how we enable innovations today and how we could do it better tomorrow.

In this conversation, I talked to the amazing RFE provoca about using solutions R and D tackle, big societal problems, gaps in the innovation ecosystem, DARPA and more. Are these career has covered almost every corner of the innovation ecosystem. She's done almost every job at DARPA where she was a program manager, started their micro electronics technology office. And several years later returned serve as their [00:01:00 ] director.

She was also the director at the national Institute of standards and technology and a venture capitalist at us venture partners. Now she's launching actuate a nonprofit leveraging the ARPA model to go after some of the biggest problems in American society. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Arthur. Provoca. 

I'd love to start off and sort of frame this for everybody is with a quote from your article, which, which everybody should read and which I will link to in the show notes. You say yet, we lack a systemic understanding of how to nurture the sort of rich ecosystem we need to confront the societal changes facing us.

Now over 75 years, the federal government has dramatically increased supportive research and universities and national labs have built layers of incentives and deep culture for the research role. Companies have honed their ability to develop products in markets, shifting away from doing their own fundamental research in established industries, American venture capital and entrepreneurship have supercharged the startup pathway for commercialization in some [00:02:00 ] sectors, but we haven't yet put enough energy into understanding the bigger space where policy finance and the market meet to scale component ideas into the kind of deep and wide innovations that can solve big previously intractable problems in society.

These sorts of problems, aren't aligned to tangible market opportunities or to the missions of established government R and D organizations today, the philanthropic sector can play a pivotal role by taking the early risk of trying new methods for R and D and developing initial examples that governments and markets can adopt and ramp up the hypothesis behind actuate is that solutions R and D can be a starting place for catalyzing the necessary change in the nation's innovation ecosystem.

And so with that, with those, I think I want to test it in a nutshell exactly like that. So can we start with how do you see solutions R and D as being different from other R D and, and sort of coupled with that? How is actuate different from other non-profits. Yeah, I think [00:03:00 ] that's, that's one of the important threads in this tapestry that we want to develop.

So solutions R and D let's see. I think those of us who live in the world of R and D and innovation are very familiar with basic research. That that is about new knowledge, new exploration, but it's designed all the incentives, all the funding and the structures are designed to have that end with publishing papers.

And then on the other hand, there's. But the whole machinery that turns an advance into, you know, takes a technological advance or a research advance and turns it into the changes that we want in society that could be new products and services. It could be new policies, it could be new practices and that implementation machinery.

The market companies, policymaking, what individuals choose to do pilot practices. I think we understand that. And there are places where the, you know, things just move from basic research over into actual [00:04:00 ] implementation. But in fact, there are, there are a lot of places where that doesn't happen, seamlessly and solutions, R and D is this weird thing in the middle.

That builds on top of a rich foundation of basic research. It has it, its objective is to demonstrate and to prove out completely radically better ways. To solve problems or to pursue different opportunities so that they can be implemented at scale. And so it has this hybrid character that it is at the one on one hand, it's very directed to specific goals.

And in that sense, it looks more like. Product development and marching forward and, you know, boom, boom, boom, make things happen, execute drive to drive, drive to an integrated goal. And on the other hand it requires a lot of creativity, experimentation risk-taking. And so it has some of those elements from the research side.

So it's this middle [00:05:00 ] kingdom that I. Love because it has, I think it just has enormous leverage. And I, you know, I, I think a couple of points, number one, it's it requires to do it well, requires its own. Types of expertise and practices and culture that are different from either the research or implementation.

And secondly, I would say that it, I think it's overall in the U S in the current us innovation system. I think it's something of a gap. There, there, there, there, there are many, many areas where we're not doing it as well as we need to. And then for some of the new problems, which I hope we'll talk about as well.

I think it's actually a very interesting lever to boot the whole system up that we're going to need going forward. Yeah. And so actually just piggybacking right off of that, you've outlined three major sort of problems that you're tackling initially. Climate change sort of health, like general American [00:06:00 ] health and data privacy.

I'm actually really interested in, like, what was the process of deciding, like, these are the things that we're going to work on. Yeah, but this whole actuate emerged from a thought process from a lot of. Bebe's rattling around in the box car in my head in the period as I was wrapping up at DARPA in 2016, at the end of 2016 and going into 2017 when I left and what I was thinking about was how phenomenally good our innovation machinery is.

For the problems that we set out to tackle at the end of the second world war, that agenda was national security technology for economic growth. A lot of that was information technology. We set out to tackle health. Instead we did biomedicine. We went long on biomedicine, didn't break their left, left a lot of our serious health problems sitting on the shelf and a big agenda was funding, basic research and, and we've executed on that agenda.

That's what we are [00:07:00 ] very, very, very good at what I couldn't stop thinking about. As I was wrapping up at DARPA is the problems that I think will, you know, many of us feel will determine whether we succeed or fail as a society going forward. So it's not that these challenges, you know, national security or how it's not that those problems have gone away and we should stop.

It's just that we have some things that will break us at our. Yeah, arguably, they are in the process of breaking us. If we don't deal with them right now, one is access to opportunity for every person in our society. A second is population health at a cost that doesn't break the economy. Another is being able to trust data and information and the information age in which we now live.

And the forest obviously is mitigating climate change. And if you think about it, these, these were not, but these weren't the top of mind issues at the end of the second world war, right? I mean, we had other problems. We didn't really know what to do about. So some of these are all problems that we didn't really know what to do about.

Some of these are new problems. And, [00:08:00 ] and so, you know, now here we are in 2021, if you say what's what really matters those were the four areas that we identified that. Are critical to the success of our society. Number one, number two, we aren't succeeding. And that means we need innovation of all different types.

And number three, we, we don't, we're not innovating, you know, we're either innovating at the zero billion dollars a year level, or we are spending money on R and D, but it's not yet turning the tide of the problem and, and that, so that's