Horizon 2020 event: Models for innovation? The culture at DARPA/ IDF Unit 8200?

The last EIFonline event in the European Parliament Brussels was about the Horizon 2020 program.

You can find all the Horizon 2020 event speeches and talks at the EIF online site. The Horizon 2020 is the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe’s global competitiveness. Running from 2014 to 2020 with an €80 billion budget, the EU’s new programme for research and innovation is part of the drive to create new growth and jobs in Europe.

This blog is an attempt to continue the conversation beyond the event.

At this event, I asked the question: Why does not the EU follow innovation models which have succeeded globally? Specifically I mentioned DARPA but also the IDF (Israel Defence Forces ) could be another.

Ofcourse both of these are defence based but I am advocating more the methodology of operations (i.e. the culture) than the domain and questioning if the EU can learn from their approach.

At the meeting, there was discussion of ‘speculative/trust based’ innovation and the risk of failure that such approaches lead to and that the ‘Bloody accountants’ as to why such models may not work in the EU

But nevertheless, I wanted to elaborate what I mean ..

And I explore the two models in some more detail.

Let us first consider DARPA with its success of the Internet, GPS, Onion routing and many others.

Here are the key characteristics at DARPA (i.e. how DARPA operates). Worth reading.

• Small and flexible: DARPA has only about 140 technical professionals; DARPA presents itself as “100 geniuses connected by a travel agent.”^[10]


• Flat organization: DARPA avoids hierarchy, essentially operating at only two management levels to ensure the free and rapid flow of information and ideas, and rapid decision-making.


• Autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic impediments: DARPA has an exemption from Title V civilian personnel specifications, which provides for a direct authority to hire talents with the expediency not allowed by the standard civil service process.


• Eclectic, world-class technical staff and performers: DARPA seeks great talents and ideas from industry, universities, government laboratories, and individuals, mixing disciplines and theoretical and experimental strength. DARPA neither owns nor operates any laboratories or facilities, and the overwhelming majority of the research it sponsors is done in industry and universities. Very little of DARPA’s research is performed at government labs.


• Teams and networks: At its very best, DARPA creates and sustains great teams of researchers from different disciplines that collaborate and share in the teams’ advances.


• Hiring continuity and change: DARPA’s technical staff is hired or assigned for four to six years. All key staff i.e. Office Directors and Program Managers are rotated to ensure constant infusion of fresh thinking and perspectives.


• Project-based assignments organized around a challenge model: DARPA organizes a significant part of its portfolio around specific technology challenges. It foresees new innovation-based capabilities and then works back to the fundamental breakthroughs required to make them possible. Although individual projects typically last three to five years, major technological challenges may be addressed over longer time periods, ensuring patient investment on a series of focused steps and keeping teams together for on-going collaboration.


• Outsourced support personnel: DARPA extensively leverages technical, contracting, and administrative services from other DoD agencies and branches of the military. This provides DARPA the flexibility to get into and out of an area without the burden of sustaining staff, while building cooperative alliances with its “agents.” These outside agents help create a constituency in their respective organizations for adopting the technology.


• Outstanding program managers: The best DARPA program managers have always been freewheeling zealots in pursuit of their goals. The Director’s most important task is to recruit and hire very creative people with big ideas, and empower them.


• Acceptance of failure: DARPA pursues breakthrough opportunities and is very tolerant of technical failure if the payoff from success will be great enough.


• Orientation to revolutionary breakthroughs in a connected approach: DARPA historically has focused not on incremental but radical innovation. It emphasizes high-risk investment, moves from fundamental technological advances to prototyping, and then hands off the system development and production to the military services or the commercial sector.


• Mix of connected collaborators: DARPA typically builds strong teams and networks of collaborators, bringing in a range of technical expertise and applicable disciplines, and involving university researchers and technology firms that are often not significant defense contractors or beltway consultants.

The other model is the IDF (note I did not mention IDF in the discussion at the event but I want to add it here).

Anyone who comes from a Telecoms/mobile background has a high opinion of Israeli companies. I always look forward with interest to the invitations of the Israel Mobile & Communication Associationat MWC. There is a specific relationship between innovation and technology and the ecosystem which fosters that innovation.  For instance, many of the high tech success stories that companies originate from the elite  IDF Unit 8200.

Yossi Vardi, the grandfather of many Israel based start-ups (and who I know from my World Economic Forum days) points out: “More high-tech billionaires were created from 8200 than from any business school in the country.”

Alumni of 8200 have gone on to found leading Israeli high-tech companies, among them Check Point, ICQ, NICE, AudioCodes, Gilat, and EZchip.

Like DARPA, there are some common characteristics common to Israeli innovation  as well

-          They are a mix of hardware and software to suit a specific need. This kind of innovation is both marketable and also defensible. (the combination of SW and HW is much harder to replicate)

-          Much of the innovation originates around security and in that, Unit 8200 is similar to USA’s  National Security Agency or GCHQ in Britain, for some reason Unit 8200 has a high proportion of start-ups which have become commercialised.

According to Forbes,  what sets the unit apart from its Sigint counterparts in the US and Europe is that it does almost all its research and development in-house. This means that, aside from interpreters and analysts, the unit is home to a huge cadre of engineers, technicians and programmers. AND  Indeed, the unit’s internal procedures and organisational culture read almost like a playbook for the start-up economy. “We are very tolerant of mistakes . . . It is impossible to be creative when fear leads you,”

The whole organization works like a set of start-ups  and the culture (for instance tolerance of failure) is a major factor for success.

There is perhaps a lot to learn for us here in Europe from the culture of both DARPA and IDF Unit 8200

See details of the EIF event at the Horizon 2020 event speeches and talks at the EIF online site

Horizon 2020 event: Models for innovation? The culture at DARPA/ IDF Unit 8200?