As part of my story on Michael Crow, I recently interviewed Christopher Darby, the president of a company called In-Q-Tel (Crow is chairman of the board), which has been around for about ten years, although I had never heard of it. In-Q-Tel is a fascinating new chapter in the story of the evolution of top secret research. It is a venture capital company started by the CIA.
Historically, when the defense or intelligence community wanted to develop a new technology they went to their contractors and asked them to work on a new spy plane or a new bugging system. This was the origin of groups like the famous Lockheed “Skunk Works,” which developed the U2. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, gives out grants for promising research. This was how the internet, which was orginally called DARPAnet, was invented (the idea was to create a system which would allow the transmission of information even though nuclear bombs had taken out many of the nodes and lines of communication).
The trouble with these old ways of doing things is that they rely on someone having an idea for something and asking someone else to develop it. But as Michael Crow said, technology is moving just too fast for anyone too keep up with all the possible ideas out there. New ideas may come up and shrivel on the vine for lack of support before the intelligence community even knows they exist.
So the CIA set up In-Q-Tel. On the one hand it’s like any other venture capital firm. People come bearing ideas for businesses, seeking financial support to help the business start and grow. But on the other hand they are quite upfront about the proposition that they are looking for ideas that will help them collect and analyze information better (although some of the companies they support seem to be more on the defense than intelligence side – you can’t really know for sure). With In-Q-Tel, the CIA is plugged into all the latest ideas and able to spot the ones that may be useful for the work they do. Many of the ideas that might otherwise bloom briefly and die can now get financial support that allows the inventors to translate an idea into a useful product, Crow says. In addition, he notes, like any other venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel has the opportunity to shape the development of a technology from very early on in order to make it more suited to the CIA’s needs.
In some ways this system is more open. Most of us had no idea what Lockheed was working on, but In-Q-Tel posts an impressive list of the companies they support and describes generally what those companies do. Makes for intriguing reading.