Restoring the Sputnik era’s sense of wonder will spark innovation.
The man who oversees information innovation at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency took to the stage in Silicon Valley and implored technology researchers to make things and actually publish their failures.
In a conversational interview at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Tuesday, DARPA’s Dan Kaufman called for change in the tech industry. “We need to change our one-way conversation with technology into two-way,” he said.
Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA (left) and John Markoff of the New York Times on stage at the Computer History Museum. Courtesy of Computer History Museum.
Kaufman also championed crowdsourcing as a valuable problem-solving tool and discussed how the agency is taking a more open approach to scientific research and moving more projects to unclassified status. “Everything we do at DARPA moves the impossible to improbable to inevitable,” he said.
The interview, part of the museum’s “Revolutionaries” series, of which Intel is a sponsor, was conducted by John Markoff of the New York Times before an audience of tech luminaries within blocks of the Goolgeplex and NASA’s Ames Research Center.
After the event, Kaufman sat down for a one-on-one conversation with Intel Free Press and discussed how excessive focus on patent protection can cause decay and the need to restore the sense of wonder that sparks tech innovation.
What’s the difference between invention and innovation?
There’s not a hard distinction. Having one without the other is almost always too shallow. If you do pure innovation where you have great thoughts but you haven’t built anything, I don’t think you’ll actually ever innovate. [At DARPA] we try to do everything big scale with lots of innovation, but at the end of the day I want to see product.
What sparks innovation?
A lot of innovation comes from annoyance. There’s this problem and it bugs you. You’re so bugged that you go solve it. It turns out that a million people are bugged by the same thing and the next thing you know you have a real product. You can’t tell people to go invent something for me. You can say, “There’s this problem and I think it should be solved.” Then everyone chimes in and agrees. Now we have a place to get together and work on this problem.
Speaking of working together, how critical is crowdsourcing for innovation and discovery?
I don’t think anyone has figured out the crowd yet. It’s a brand new science. The question I would ask is, “How do I look at five problems and understand that these three are good for crowdsourcing and these two are bad?” We have to keep in mind that the crowd gets to vote, but we can’t confuse crowdsourcing with free labor. For crowdsourcing to really work it has to be interactive. The crowd has to have a say in the outcome, but also needs a say in identifying the problem.
You wrote a textbook on intellectual property law. How do you see the role of IP changing?
If you create a great product, you’re going to be out in front of people and you’re going to do just fine. There’s nothing wrong with companies wanting patents and to be protected, but I think that if the majority of your efforts are focused on [protecting IP], it’s almost the beginning of the decay of your company. You need to focus your bright brains on making the next incredible product. The idea is, go make cool stuff and lawyers can do the lawyer thing.
What countries have an edge in scientific research?
No country has a monopoly on great ideas or great people. One of the things we’ve worked at really hard inside DARPA is opening things up — moving most research projects from classified to unclassified. We try to bring in people from different groups, ethnicities and sexes. There is scientific evidence that shows over and over again that diversity yields benefits. To me, that goes for anywhere in the world.
Technology is more ubiquitous, countries are coming online and getting more tools and more power, and some people are worried about America’s dominance being threatened. I don’t view it that way. I view technology as a gift to the world.
Scientists of a certain age talk about Sputnik or seeing the Moon launch. We need that age of wonder again. What sparks technology is not showing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) scores. It’s not about beating this country or that country. What we need is a sense of wonder, like when you look at something and think, “Oh my, this is amazing and I want to be a part of it.” That’s our job at DARPA.
Restoring the Sputnik era’s sense of wonder will spark innovation.
The man who oversees information innovation at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency took to the stage in Silicon Valley and implored technology researchers to make things and actually publish their failures.
In a conversational interview at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Tuesday, DARPA’s Dan Kaufman called for change in the tech industry. “We need to change our one-way conversation with technology into two-way,” he said.
Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA (left) and John Markoff of the New York Times on stage at the Computer History Museum. Courtesy of Computer History Museum.
Kaufman also championed crowdsourcing as a valuable problem-solving tool and discussed how the agency is taking a more open approach to scientific research and moving more projects to unclassified status. “Everything we do at DARPA moves the impossible to improbable to inevitable,” he said.
The interview, part of the museum’s “Revolutionaries” series, of which Intel is a sponsor, was conducted by John Markoff of the New York Times before an audience of tech luminaries within blocks of the Goolgeplex and NASA’s Ames Research Center.
After the event, Kaufman sat down for a one-on-one conversation with Intel Free Press and discussed how excessive focus on patent protection can cause decay and the need to restore the sense of wonder that sparks tech innovation.
What’s the difference between invention and innovation?
There’s not a hard distinction. Having one without the other is almost always too shallow. If you do pure innovation where you have great thoughts but you haven’t built anything, I don’t think you’ll actually ever innovate. [At DARPA] we try to do everything big scale with lots of innovation, but at the end of the day I want to see product.
What sparks innovation?
A lot of innovation comes from annoyance. There’s this problem and it bugs you. You’re so bugged that you go solve it. It turns out that a million people are bugged by the same thing and the next thing you know you have a real product. You can’t tell people to go invent something for me. You can say, “There’s this problem and I think it should be solved.” Then everyone chimes in and agrees. Now we have a place to get together and work on this problem.
Speaking of working together, how critical is crowdsourcing for innovation and discovery?
I don’t think anyone has figured out the crowd yet. It’s a brand new science. The question I would ask is, “How do I look at five problems and understand that these three are good for crowdsourcing and these two are bad?” We have to keep in mind that the crowd gets to vote, but we can’t confuse crowdsourcing with free labor. For crowdsourcing to really work it has to be interactive. The crowd has to have a say in the outcome, but also needs a say in identifying the problem.
You wrote a textbook on intellectual property law. How do you see the role of IP changing?
If you create a great product, you’re going to be out in front of people and you’re going to do just fine. There’s nothing wrong with companies wanting patents and to be protected, but I think that if the majority of your efforts are focused on [protecting IP], it’s almost the beginning of the decay of your company. You need to focus your bright brains on making the next incredible product. The idea is, go make cool stuff and lawyers can do the lawyer thing.
What countries have an edge in scientific research?
No country has a monopoly on great ideas or great people. One of the things we’ve worked at really hard inside DARPA is opening things up — moving most research projects from classified to unclassified. We try to bring in people from different groups, ethnicities and sexes. There is scientific evidence that shows over and over again that diversity yields benefits. To me, that goes for anywhere in the world.
Technology is more ubiquitous, countries are coming online and getting more tools and more power, and some people are worried about America’s dominance being threatened. I don’t view it that way. I view technology as a gift to the world.
Scientists of a certain age talk about Sputnik or seeing the Moon launch. We need that age of wonder again. What sparks technology is not showing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) scores. It’s not about beating this country or that country. What we need is a sense of wonder, like when you look at something and think, “Oh my, this is amazing and I want to be a part of it.” That’s our job at DARPA.
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