David Victor's Research Cited in Foreign Policy
The Weekly Wrap -- ARPA and technology bets
07/23/2011
Steve LeVine,
Foreign Policy
ARPA and technology bets: At Bloomberg, Ken Stier writes a long piece on Arpa-E, the agency formed on a bet that, by copying a highly successful Pentagon formula, the federal government can trigger revolutionary advances in alternative energy technologies. The model is Darpa, the radical innovation lab that produced the Internet, GPS and a lot of the semiconductor advances we've seen over the years. In a new piece in Foreign Affairs, David Victor and Kassia Yanosek argue that clean energy is in trouble in part because genuine innovation is underfunded. So I emailed Victor asking why he would say that considering Arpa-E's stable of somewhat risky investments. His reply is that Arpa-E's investments are "the right idea," but that the agency needs to become even riskier -- it must "focus on even earlier stage technologies -- well before even the venture capitalists are interested." Ultimately, Victor says, Arpa-E lacks Darpa's central super sauce -- a captive, deep-pocketed end user with whom it can scale up the manufacture of its products.
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David Victor is Director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR). Looking across a wide array of issues from environment and energy to human rights, trade and security, the Laboratory explores when (and why) international laws actually work.
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