There are countless ambitious research programs with high potential for social impact that are not a good fit for academia, but also need substantial development before they’re suitable for corporate or venture funding (or are simply non-commercial social goods). Examples include everything from the development of mRNA vaccines to the foundations of the internet. Overcoming this Valley of Death requires ambitious and patient funding from governments and philanthropies.
Fortunately, there has been a recent surge of new philanthropic and public funding sources for ambitious, not-for-profit research programs. ARPA-H alone has a $3 billion budget to support breakthrough biomedical ideas and ARIA, the new UK ARPA, has about $1B. There’s also JEDI and SPRIN-D in Europe, nascent agencies or proposals in Japan and South Korea, and of course the “mature ARPAs” in the US (DARPA, ARPA-E, and IARPA). New non-profit models like the **Focused Research Organizations** (FROs) launched by Convergent Research have a similar scope and shape. These organizations are positioned to play an essential role in supporting the next generation of high-impact technologies, but whether they succeed or fail is largely dependent on talent.
Leading mission-driven, translational, and finite coordinated research programs like the ones ARPA’s and other new science funders hope to establish requires an unusual set of skills, including field exploration and mapping, designing programs for impact and transition, navigating diverse institutional incentives, calibrating and communicating mission and vision, and defining and measuring quantitative metrics to track success across a complex program with multiple integrated technical areas.
This playbook attempts to collect some skills, lessons learned, use-cases, and stories that we’ve found helpful over the years. It's not a comprehensive guide, and every agency, program, and program manager is different, but we think it's a good place to start.
🎩 A Program Manager Wears Many Hats
The leader of a coordinated research program needs to wear many hats. This is one of the reasons why the job is so hard! These hats roughly correspond to the different phases of a program, from ideation to transition. Each phase is almost akin to a completely different job and a great PM should be able to wear them all (often at the same time).
Chapter 2: Exploration & Field Mapping
Chapter 5: Communicating Your Vision
Chapter 6: Program Engineering
Chapter 7: Program Execution & Management
It’s important to note that these phases are not rigidly sequential. They bleed into each other and you need to work on several at the same time: it’s important to consider tech transition even while doing exploration and field mapping — keeping your eyes out for who will shepherd the technology beyond your program and what those people care about; you will need to update both your program design in real time as you execute on it and run into previously unknown unknowns; you should have a communicable vision from day one and update it as you explore and refine ideas.
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Listen to audio version:
2_ Exploration and Field Strategy (1).wav
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The goals of exploration and field mapping are to:
Your role here is similar to a startup founder doing customer exploration.
You probably come into a program with a hunch. If you don’t; create one. Exploration without an initial hunch to at least bias your search is far less effective. The point of a coordinated research program is to reach a goal. It’s tempting (and a commendable urge) to leave yourself completely open to serendipitous goals. It’s counterintuitive but having a goal makes it more likely to find different goals because you have something to compare to and contrast against.
Field mapping is the process of figuring out the state of a “field” — the rough interconnected ideas. Who is working on what? What things are not being worked on? Why?