Episode 77: Meet DARPAConnect

This episode focuses on DARPAConnect, a DARPA initiative designed to expand engagement with non-traditional defense contractors and researchers, fostering a diverse national security ecosystem.

1. DARPAConnect targets non-traditional entities like small businesses and academia to broaden the innovation landscape.
2. It provides a structured yet flexible learning and networking environment through pop-up events and virtual engagements.
3. The initiative offers personalized support such as one-on-one coaching to guide new participants.
4. Online courses available through DARPAConnect help demystify the agency’s processes and enhance proposer readiness.
5. The program's success is measured by its ability to integrate new ideas and individuals into the national security domain.

1: Introduction to DARPAConnect

Explores the goals and structure of DARPAConnect, emphasizing its role in making DARPA more accessible to a wider audience. "Jess Rezig: DARPAConnect allows networking and opens doors for those unfamiliar with defense sectors."

2: Engaging New Contributors

Details how DARPAConnect reaches out to potential new collaborators and supports them through various initiatives. "Ben Griffin: The initiative is crucial for capturing the most disruptive ideas across a vast landscape."

3: Impact and Expansion

Discusses the impact of DARPAConnect over its first year and plans for its future expansion. "Kyle Warner: The expansion of DARPAConnect has been highly successful, and we aim to grow this further."

1. Explore Opportunities: Engage with DARPA through events and online resources to understand potential collaborations.
2. Utilize Online Curriculum: Take advantage of the DARPAConnect online lessons to gain a better understanding of the agency’s mission and opportunities.
3. Network Actively: Participate in DARPAConnect events to build connections with DARPA personnel and like-minded innovators.
4. Seek One-on-One Coaching: Use the personalized coaching offered by DARPAConnect to align your projects or ideas with DARPA’s objectives.
5. Stay Informed: Regularly check for updates on new initiatives and opportunities announced by DARPAConnect.

Good ideas can come from anywhere, but what is the best way to find them, or help them find you? In 2022, DARPA hit the road in pursuit of the answer. Comprising six regional events, DARPA Forward (https://forward.darpa.mil/) took the agency across the country to engage untapped talent and strengthen the nationwide innovation ecosystem. The event series offered a powerful lesson in breaking down barriers of entry in pursuit of national security breakthroughs. To sustain this momentum, DARPA launched DARPAConnect, an initiative that aims to further broaden the agency’s reach and foster greater collaboration with underrepresented, diverse, and nontraditional institutions new to the national security space. In this episode of Voices from DARPA (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/podcast), we’re taking a deep dive on DARPAConnect, talking with several of those involved in the initiative to get a sense of how it all works. We’ll explore its goals, its offerings, and what success looks like at DARPA, home to some of the biggest – and riskiest – bets on U.S. technological innovation. DARPAConnect website: https://www.darpaconnect.us/home (https://www.darpaconnect.us/home)

People

Jess Rezig, Ben Griffin, Kyle Warner, Amber Corin, Jennifer Thabat, Joanna Arthur

Content Warnings:

None

Kyle Warner

Coming to DARPA is like grabbing the nose cone of a rocket and holding on for dear life. DARPA is a place where if you don't invent the Internet, you only get a b. A DARPA program manager quite literally invents tomorrow. Coming to work every day and being humbled by that. DARPA is not one person or one place.

It's a collection of people that are excited about moving technology forward. Hello, and welcome to voices from DARPA. I'm your host, Amber Corin. DARPA's mission is create and prevent strategic surprise by developing breakthrough technologies for national security. Those breakthroughs at the heart of DARPA's mission start as ideas.

Amber Corin

Sometimes they emerge as fantastical concepts, the kind of imaginative thinking that elicits uncertainty or even outright disbelief. These ideas, the kind that involve wild risks and in many places, swift dismissal, that's actually what DARPA looks for, to achieve the mission.

In the words of DARPA director Doctor Stephanie Tompkins, there are a lot of. Problems in the world. The one that really keeps me up at night is the fact that the ideas that might be out there, which could solve those problems and those threats to national security, we might actually never hear or might be missing entirely.

Capturing the best ideas for solving the toughest national security challenges that could be out there in the ether. Not so straightforward.

But it's a critical goal that requires dismantling organizational logjams and creating new avenues to a wide open frontier of groundbreaking ideas. At DARPA, we have an initiative for just this purpose. It's called DARPA Connect. And in this episode, you'll hear from some of the people who are working to expand the national security ecosystem and find the big ideas that might otherwise go unheard. DARPA Connect is designed to break down those barriers and help businesses near the national security space figure out how to navigate DARPA and work with us.

Jennifer Thabat

Our goal is really to help people understand that there's no one pathway to entry, that any idea we can help turn into a performer. Whether you are a young faculty, whether you working on a small business innovation research program, or even if you want to come on board as a contractor, we are really designed to help open up the gates and teach you how to become involved with us. That's Jennifer Thabat, program director of DARPA's small business programs office. Shes helped spearhead the execution of DARPA connect. Working in partnership with the Applied Research Institute, or ARI, and with support from the Tougaloo College Research and Development Foundation.

DARPA Connect really picks up where DARPA forward left off with DARPA forward. We talked to you about what we do and what areas of interest are most important to us for national security. And now what DARPA Connect is doing is teaching you how to actually engage and how to work with us. Working with the government can be complicated. It can be daunting, even for seasoned government contractors.

Amber Corin

For people and organizations who have never worked with the government, it can become a herculean effort.

The goal of DARPA Connect is to try to shepherd you through that process, whether you're interested in working for the agency as a contractor, a performer, as they are referred to here, or you're finishing your PhD, or even looking for what's next as a researcher or an active duty service member with a STEM degree. Here's Doctor Jess Rezig from Ari. She works closely with the many stakeholders involved to make into reality what started as a vision for that thriving and diverse national security ecosystem. It's an open initiative. We target new, non traditional performers so people who haven't traditionally worked with DARPA thinking small businesses or academics who maybe don't have experience with the DoD or national security.

Jess Rezig

But it really is an open initiative, and we think that's important because it allows people to network as well. So people might be coming from large primes or even from large companies that have sectors that haven't worked with DARPA before, and we can help to share information with them and help them to network with one another regionally and nationally to better engage with the agency. Ideally, DARPA Connect provides a foundation for working in national security that includes through the network, it facilitates the guidance it provides and the opportunities for direct access. It's a comprehensive approach designed to both demystify and to open doors. There was always sort of these strange misconceptions about what DARPA was.

Ben Griffin

I think it's a lot more accessible than people realize. That's Doctor Ben Griffin, a former program manager now serving as deputy director of the Microsystems technology office at DARPA. He's also an enthusiastic champion of DARPA Connect. It is designed in such a way to give the basic working knowledge of how DARPA executes its mission and how folks can engage to increase their opportunities and define those avenues for changing the world with their technology. If we're supposed to be getting the best, most disruptive ideas, we need the largest idea landscape humanly possible.

Jess Rezig

We think of it as a holistic program, and we're trying to really ensure that we support people in a number of different ways. Large scale pop up events are held about quarterly throughout the nation. And also virtually so that people can join and network with regional resources and individuals who have similar interests. But we're also going to be rolling out larger scale virtual events as well, so that people get opportunities to connect remotely. The online community allows people to engage over time, but our DARPA Connect team offers coaching sessions as well.

So for people who are new to DARPA or aren't sure whether their Helmire catechism is quite up to par, or who want feedback about who to connect with, our one on one coaching sessions give them an opportunity to meet with a member of the DARPA Connect team to really talk specifically about their goals and interests, about the work that they've done, and how they can best engage with DARPA. Moving forward, we also offer a fully online curriculum of lessons that people can take just in time on a variety of different topics, ranging from DARPA 101 and what is the agency? All the way through to specific information about broad agency announcements and types of funding opportunities, as well as ways to prepare for DARPA events like proposer days. So trying to ensure that they have the opportunity both to self serve and network with others as well. DARPA Connect's curriculum is another key component in this effort, and it's a great guide on how to work with DARPA.

Our online curriculum uses a variety of different videos, some text based lessons, but it's highly interactive. They're short lessons. We're trying to keep these very topical so people can go in and really select what's most relevant to them and get through them in ideally 30 minutes or less to try to keep this straightforward so that they can learn what they need to know and implement it quickly. Being able to access the curriculum online is just incredibly powerful. Getting that sort of basic working knowledge can really help you have a much more informed conversation.

Ben Griffin

So I really encourage that it's a small investment in time to do the online curriculum, which I think is going to allow that information to proliferate.

Amber Corin

Ultimately, this initiative is about access to tremendous opportunities, and one thing that sets it apart, as Jen Thabat notes here, is the emphasis on building a community. We use the word community intentionally. It's meant to be a community. We talk about your DARPA journey because these are not meant to be single touch points. These are meant to be a partnership, a relationship between the DARPA Connect team and potential performers.

Jennifer Thabat

And so the hope is that they will join us in our pop ups, they will do our online curriculum, and they will engage on one on one with our program managers, and DARPA Connect will be there all along the way, partnering with them to help them be successful. I've really enjoyed DARPA connect and reaching out to a broad community, oftentimes in sort of a quote unquote non traditional sense, whether nontraditional universities that haven't had as much DARPA experience, whether or not it's small businesses that haven't considered whether or not their technologies would align with DARPA and really sort of breaking down some of those barriers. The goal here is that DARPA connect participants, armed with foundational knowledge and community support, can more quickly and more effectively become part of the ecosystem.

Amber Corin

Doctor Joanna Arthur is the DARPA program manager who's attended DARPA Connect pop up events and sees a direct line between the initiative and bigger picture progress. We're constantly in this innovation turn, trying to get new ideas, new people. So I think it's another avenue to get fresh blood in and fresh perspectives on a science front. It's also important, you know, not just to go to the BAA or to the DARPA connect link, really seeding and feeding those connections. I really like this idea of having the expertise on demand, so as you're working through whether a BAA or CIBR, you can get feedback, that coaching aspect.

DARPA program manager Doctor Kyle Warner makes an important point along these lines. This community benefits everyone involved, including those already inside the agency. There's value anytime folks that don't know a lot about each other, coming to a table and learning more about the other's existence and their perspectives. And DARPA Connect provided an opportunity to reach out to folks that are not traditional defense performers or contractors for us and show them that our mission is much more broad than one might see in everyday news. And in doing so, we're able to engage folks for research opportunities in other areas, to contribute not only to the science and technology of our future, but in doing so, help our nation's defense of the same time.

Kyle Warner

On the flip side, we find ourselves learning more about what some small businesses and universities and other research partners might be interested in, what they work on day to day. And that helps us not only learn about the individuals and their interests, both technically and from a personality standpoint, but it also exposes us to research ideas and opportunities through those small businesses work that we may not have been able to have within our net that we cast. More generally, I'd say one of the most interesting things about DARPA Connect was really connecting with the people that had never been exposed to DARPA. On a very personal level, we were able to sit down and just have lunch together. I did a lot of learning myself at DARPA Connect, and I hope that we as an organization can continue to learn from the folks that we meet and hopefully scale this to a much larger level.

I think there was only goodness that came out of it, and I'd love to see that expanded. Continued expansion is definitely a goal for DARPA Connect, but it does raise an important question as DARPA connect enters its second year and continues to build out its offerings and its reach at a place where metrics are crucial. What does success look like? Heres Jess Ruzig with her take. Ultimately, as we talk about preventing and creating strategic surprise that can take a number of different forms, right?

Jess Rezig

That might be new ideas that make their way into programs that never would have been here before. It might be new young faculty or new innovation fellows who maybe didn't recognize DARPA as a potential career path for them who now can bring their expertise and skills into the national security space. There's a variety of different paths that success can take, just in the same way that there's no single entry point, there's no single point of success, which I think for us means that success really is all about getting new people in the door who wouldn't have been here otherwise.

Amber Corin

As a seasoned DARPA PM turned tech office, deputy director Ben Griffin emphasizes the need to look at the bigger picture. That's something that's part of DARPA's legacy as the driver behind key breakthroughs that took several years to become the mainstream technologies we rely on today. It's a long term investment. The payout of doing something like this might not be apparent for some time. It could be an immediate engagement from folks.

Ben Griffin

It could be in more people proposing, could be in more successful proposals from non traditionals, which, you know, there'll be a time lag to start being able to quantify that. But also, notably, it's an investment in people. It's an investment in people and organizations. And so you might see the fruits of this labor even a decade from now in the people that are coming to be program managers because they came to a connect event and started to understand and think about technology and how it interacts with the world in a different way, and that set them up down a new path. So it's hard.

It's really hard to quantify, but we are DARPA. For Jen Thabat, there is anecdotal evidence of progress in her own interactions throughout DARPA Connect. I think for me, one of the most powerful pieces of feedback I've gotten from attendees at the pop up events has been from potential proposers that had proposed unsuccessfully to DARPA in the past. And they walk away from these pop up events and say, ooh, if I had known all of this before, I would have been able to submit a stronger proposal. And so DARPA connect is really designed to reach new, nontraditional performers, but we're also trying to reach some of those proposers that have those great ideas but need a little bit of help understanding how best to work and propose with DARPA.

Jennifer Thabat

And so, for me, that was a really powerful piece of feedback that it gave them encouragement to continue to try to become a performer at DARPA. And for Jen, there is one particular key metric. Success comes in many forms. Success can come in the form of uncovering that great new idea that changes the way we think about things, and that person wouldn't have engaged with us otherwise. Success can really come in the form that we were able to encourage a university professor or a small business entrepreneur to come and work with DARPA, either as a performer or as a program manager.

But I think, really, overall success can be answering the call from our director that hopefully we can help her sleep a little better, because people now know how to engage and work with us and help us solve our problems. DARPA is in the business of high stakes risks and rewards. So these perspectives and insights have the potential for serious impact as the agency looks ahead. It's really hard to work at DARPA. We don't just give you an award and talk to you six months later.

We really try to partner with you as much as DARPA Connect partners with a potential performer. Once you become a performer, your program manager or your c to contractor support really partners with you through the process. And so what DARPA Connect is really trying to do is educate you, not just on the process, but what is entailed with being a performer. Now, once you graduate from DARPA, your technology has kind of been de risked, and it's sort of like a golden ticket, right? You can say, I graduated, I had a DARPA ceiling or a DARPA program, and I was successful.

But in order to get there, DARPA Connect is trying to help give you those tools and resources. DArpa's over the horizon. Work on national security. It's a big deal. It's a big opportunity.

Amber Corin

And if it's something you feel drawn to, something you feel like you could really contribute to, and if you're someone with those novel ideas that can truly make a difference, you are who DARPA is looking for. This is why DARPA Connect exists. It really does open up the aperture for a two way discussion, which I don't think happens at a lot of other government agencies. Our attendees are walking away from our pop up events with empowerment to reach out to our program managers and make those connections, partnering with DARPA Connect, or making that first initial touchpoint on their own. My hope for DARPA connect is that it continues to blossom.

Kyle Warner

The first opportunities that we've seen through DARPA Connect have been, in my opinion, highly successful, and the opportunity space for those to grow and find even more entities and people that can come into the ecosystem of DARPA's reach, I think is immense. You come here to disrupt the world, to change the world, but what you don't understand is that DARPA will have just as much of an impact on you in the way that you are thinking and seeing the world. I like to tell people that the only thing that's standing between them and working with DARPA tends to be them. We are trying to give you the tools to help you engage in whatever form or fashion, and we want to hear from you. And that's what DARPA connect is designed to do.

Jennifer Thabat

They're designed to help partner with you, to help you through that journey. So you're ready to connect. Visit Darpaconnect us and hit the join button on the homepage for access to the community, all of the materials and resources, and our calendar of upcoming events. And by joining the online community, you'll also be added to the mailing list. Reach out with questions by emailing DArpa Connectarpa mil.

Amber Corin

That's all for this episode of voices from DARPA. You can find in our show notes links to all of the resources we discussed. As always, thank you for listening.

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