The DARPA model provides funding to start-ups, attracts venture capital, and chooses projects with experts rather than bureaucrats

Block (2008, 188) identifies the four key characteristics of the DARPA model:2

• A series of relatively small offices, often staffed with leading scientists and engineers, are given considerable budget autonomy to support promising ideas. These offices are proactive rather than reactive and work to set an agenda for researchers in the field. The goal is to create a scientific community with a presence in universities, the public sector and corporations that focuses on specific technological challenges that have to be overcome.

• Funding is provided to a mix of university-based researchers, start-up firms, established firms and industry consortia. There is no dividing line between 'basic research' and 'applied research', since the two are deeply intertwined. Moreover, the DARPA personnel are encouraged to cut off funding to groups that are not making progress and reallocate resources to other groups that have more promise.

• Since the goal is to produce usable technological advances, the agency's mandate extends to helping firms get products to the stage of commercial viability. The agency can provide firms with assistance that goes well beyond research funding.

• Part of the agency's task is to use its oversight role to link ideas, resources and people in constructive ways across the different research and development sites.

The main focus is to assist firms in developing new product and process innovations. The key is that the government serves as a leader for firms to imitate, in an approach that is much more 'hands on', in that public sector officials are working directly with firms in identifying and pursuing the most promising innovative paths. In so doing, the government is able to attract top minds—exactly the kind of expertise that generates the dynamism that government is often accused of not having. As mentioned in the foreword, this is clearly a self-fulfilling prophecy, because a government under constant attack will not dare be confident and dynamic.