The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be sponsoring the
first DARPA Combinator, an exercise to be held on the campus of the University
of Washington, from Dec. 12-16, 2014, with $10,000 in awards.
A select group of approximately 30 participants will include faculty and
students from a variety of both technical and non-technical disciplines,
invited external experts, entrepreneurs, and other participants from industry
and national labs, from which 6 to 8 interdisciplinary teams will be formed.
The exercise will start with a dinner workshop on Dec. 12, where the teams will
be presented with 22 specific technologies developed through DARPA-funded
research, and challenged to develop innovative and novel ideas for new products
and businesses utilizing two or more of these technologies. The ideas will be
developed over the following three days of collaborative work, and the exercise
will wrap up with team presentations, lunch and awards on Dec. 16. A panel of
judges will select the top three teams, who will be awarded $5,000, $3,000, and
$2,000 respectively for their work. The exercise will help DARPA evaluate the
effectiveness of a new mechanism for increasing the awareness, uptake, and
commercialization rate of US Government-funded research results. Assume you
will spend at least 20 hours over the course of the exercise.
More details of the exercise are provided below. If you are interestred in
participating, please apply by 5 pm Thursday Dec. 4, at
https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/mclarke/254395
DARPA Combinator Workshop
Dec. 12-16, 2014
University of Washington
Every year, the US Government sponsors a large amount of research on a wide
variety of topics. Much of this research output is effectively abandoned after
the primary research contracts expire. This is for a number of well-known
reasons; for example, the specific research itself fails to develop in a
promising way, the sponsoring organization loses interest in the research
topic, key research personnel move on or become unavailable, the overall
research setting and sponsor priorities shift, and so on. It is noteworthy
that many of these reasons are not because the research itself was inadequate
or a failure, but are the result of changes in the surrounding context in which
the research was carried out. The mechanism by which sponsored research results
can be picked up again in a new research contract or a commercialization
attempt is fairly inefficient, as it typically relies on interested
organizations to find out about the prior research. The current system for
discovering prior results of Government-sponsored research is based on a group
of Government web sites and occasional conferences.
DARPA would like to evaluate the effectiveness of a new mechanism for
increasing the overall awareness, uptake, and eventual commercialization of US
Government-funded research results. This mechanism is patterned after the
successful ideation exercises that occur in the world of technology startup
companies. We refer to this mechanism as a Technology Ideation Exercise (TIE).
A TIE is structured around a pair of half-day workshops, spaced several days
apart, in which challenge participants to create novel commercial ideas via
novel combinations of actual government-developed technical results. The TIE is
designed to involve ideation and learning only, with no expectation of the TIE
participants actually licensing the technology, creating a prototype, or
starting a commercial endeavor. Consequently, the TIE participants will be
directed to assume that the technology works and is performant, can be
integrated with other needed technologies within a reasonable amount of time,
and can be licensed from the IP owner on reasonable terms.
Given this, in the proposed TIE:
* The technology descriptions will be derived from final reports from SBIR
Phase I awards.
* The initial half-day dinner workshop on Dec. 12 will involve:
o An introduction for the participants to the goals and structure of the TIE
o Briefings on the individual TIE technologies
o Briefing on the functions of coordination website
o Question and Answer period
o Networking and social time
* The concluding half-day workshop on Dec. 16 will involve:
o Presentations by each team to a panel of evaluators on their business idea(s)
for combinations of the TIE technologies
o After a deliberation period, announcement of the best ideas in the judgment
of the evaluation panel
o Networking and social time
