VIDEO: Don’t hand over the grant money and run

For a researcher with a promising idea who has just received an injection of grant money, it must be tempting to close the lab door, block out all extraneous thought, and settle into a period of quiet research.

That is not an approach favoured by Cheryl Martin however. As acting chief of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, better known as ARPA-E, the government agency for energy research, the question she likes to ask when handing over a three-year grant is, “What happens in month 37?”

That can be an uncomfortable query for a researcher pre-occupied with the immediate hurdle of ushering an idea off paper and into the world, but giving it some thought in the early stages pays off in the long run.

“What we’ve seen at ARPA-E that works is having a conversation about what happens next while you’re doing the research,” Martin said.

This leads on to another favourite question in ARPA-E, “If it works, will it matter?”

Don’t hand over the grant money and run, in other words. Martin and her colleagues stay active right up to the hand-off point at which research is translated into a product with commercial potential and ready to go to market. “We worry about what happens when the project is over. We have a chat with customers, and design a natural course of action versus a random thing that doesn’t make any sense to people,” she said.

The agency likes to put its chips down on high-risk, high-reward technologies, or “bold, transformational” energy projects, in its own words. If everyone at ARPA-E has done their jobs well, the risk will have been significantly lowered and a venture capital firm will be waiting at the other end to invest, Martin said.

It helps that Martin knows a thing or two about what investors are looking for because before joining ARPA-E, she was an Executive in Residence with the VC firm, Kleiner Perkins.

Martin arrived at ARPA-E three years ago. After spending 20 years in the private sector, she one day received an unexpected call from the former US Secretary of Energy who offered her the prospect of working in a startup government agency focused on “changing what is possible” for the country’s energy future. It was not something she could turn down.

Modelled after the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ARPA-E was created on paper in 2007 by George W Bush, but had no actual funding until its budget was passed as part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Today, the agency is staffed by about 100 people, with an annual budget of €225 million. The US Congress, which approves ARPA-E’s budget each year, is the de facto board of directors.

Frame a problem in a novel way

Getting people to the table early is something ARPA-E likes to do, said Martin. “We get together a lot of smart people from academia, small and big businesses. We then challenge them with a problem and bring new eyes and disciplines to bear on it,” she said. 

In the past six years, discussions like this, which may include people who, “never realised they had an answer to an energy problem before”, have resulted in 360 projects, with Martin’s team injecting just over €700 million altogether.

Typically, projects funded by the agency last three years and receive $3 million. The proposals that stand out are those that frame a challenge in a novel way.

Take electric cars, one of the agency’s main interests. “What if someone said batteries were not just components, but could form an actual part of the structural frame of the car? [It would mean] thinking about the weight and effectiveness of the battery in a totally different way,” said Martin. A couple of the agency’s battery projects have made advances on what is possible with lithium-sulphur and lithium-air batteries, she added.

Again, under the headline of energy storage, her agency recently designed a backpack equipped with cameras and sensors, which allows a person to walk through a building and quickly get a blueprint or thermal photo of where energy is being lost, be it through windows or poorly insulated walls. 

Not everything has worked out, but instead of doggedly pursuing the original plan, Martin is happier to throw her hands up. To date, ARPA-E has discontinued 21 projects early, but Martin said the only failure would lie in not stopping them.  

“Fear of admitting something does not work is a common, not often discussed, barrier to progress that we have worked hard to remove from our model,” she said.