Public innovation agencies, such as the US-based DARPA and its successors, play a critical role in identifying and promoting technologies with transformative potential. This is due to their mission of bridging the gap between basic and applied research by providing financial, technological, and managerial resources for high-risk / high-reward innovation projects. They rely on expert networks to identify promising technologies and can rapidly mobilize substantial funding. Given their high propensity for impact on transformative technologies, there is a need to better understand how they actually search for, evaluate, and select technologies under conditions of deep uncertainty, and how their missions and organizational designs shape technological trajectories.

This project draws on collaboration with public innovation agencies as well as selected private innovation laboratories. The research combines qualitative interviews with program managers and innovation experts to map scouting practices, evaluative frameworks, and portfolio strategies, along with observations and archival data, to assess how these frameworks incorporate changing technological and societal conditions. By comparing funded projects with rejected applicants and suitable control groups, the project eventually examines how agency decisions influence knowledge generation, technology development pathways, and broader social and environmental outcomes.

In enhancing knowledge about agency-driven pathways to innovation in public and private contexts, this project supports the focus areas of TransforM with practical and implementable results to expand research capacity, improve evaluation frameworks, and inform the design of effective innovation policies for high-impact technological change.