Disruptive Innovation: Exploring Models for a New Era of Deep Tech

Context
Deeptech innovation has become a priority in many countries to ensure prosperity, resilience and security. In parallel to increased funding, there is growing interest in doing and funding science/innovation differently to promote disruptive ideas. DARPA-like agencies are being created in several countries, and different setups are emerging. When looking at the details, those agencies share similar ambitions and some operational and design principles but they also differ quite significantly in how they operate and fund projects. In parallel, many initiatives have been proposed and/or experimented with to accelerate the emergence of innovation and provide conditions for ideas to emerge: Focused Research Organizations, Bennett Lab in Cambridge, Ada Lovelace Institutes, Fast Grants, etc… What can be learnt about those experiments? How important are the funding models in innovation (importance of the “how” and the “what”)? Is it time to rethink how science is organised and funded to increase its potential impact?
Why such an event?
Several countries, including the Netherlands, are in the process of setting up new agencies/structure for disruptive innovation and several recent initiatives/agencies have now accumulated significant returns of experience that are rarely discussed amongst innovators, decision-makers and practitioners.
The proposed event addresses this gap by focusing the discussions around fundamental aspects of disruptive innovation agencies and initiatives. It will cover:

• The role of new DARPA-like agencies: beyond the funding how do they contribute to a more innovative/risk-taking ecosystem?
• How are they positioned within and influenced by the existing local ecosystem?
• What can we learn from initiatives? like FROs or past and proposed laboratories/initiatives? Beyond the novelty, can we use those to improve the innovation ecosystem?
• Multi-agency collaborations/ supra-national versus national efforts: is there value in cross-border collaborations or does it defeat the initial purpose?
• The importance of people and mindset: how do we “train” people or change the research culture to get more bold ideas? The half-day event will combine keynotes describing lessons learnt from different initiatives and panel discussions where participants can discuss and surface the areas of convergence and divergence around those different initiatives.