DRIVING INNOVATION:

In February of 1958 President Eisenhower set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA - the D for Defense was added later) with a simple mission: to make sure the US would never again be surprised by developments in new technology.

From the start, DARPA has operated as a unit of the Department of Defense, though it's been free to think long-term and not feel bound by the need to develop weapons. It's a nimble organisation, with only a couple of hundred employees - and a budget of $3 billion.

Its approach is to look way into the future and find and fund the smart people who will get us there. Some of its work is seriously secret.3 But many of its innovations are well known.

Its most recent claim to fame is self-driving cars. Big car companies are now sparring with Silicon Valley start-ups to turn their experimental vehicles into production models, but it was as recently as 2004 that DARPA kick-started this rapid technological development. Instead of splashing out large sums to university researchers, DARPA decided to run a competition. Anyone could compete, their cars had to trundle across 142 miles of desert to get to the finish line, and the winner would take home $1 million. Incredibly given where we are now, every single entry in that first round failed to make it. But DARPA persisted, and in 2005 five vehicles crossed the finishing line, with Stanford University taking home the prize. DARPA moved on to an urban course, and then decided its support was no longer needed.

Of course, DARPA's biggest claim to fame is the internet. Or, as it was originally called, the ARPANET. Back in the 1960s there was a simple need: a system that could not be destroyed by a Soviet nuclear attack. Hence the idea of joining up computers - initially between universities - in a network that did not depend on any single hub. And that burning platform led to DARPA funding 70% of all US computer research in the early 60s.

It was two key thinkers working on the project, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who came up with what we now recognise as the internet. The story goes like this: Cerf was hanging around in a hotel lobby and came up with the idea of a new 'communications protocol' that would enable networks to connect with each other. It came to be known as TCP/IP. First tested on ARPANET in 1977, it's the standard we're still using today. 

The outlines of this story are well-known, but its implications less so. Because DARPA and other US government funding agencies did not just invent the internet - they devised the tools that made the digital economy possible; and enormously profitable.

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