Science is art. It is the process of creating something that never exi — Regina E. Dugan

"I do think that speed is part of the innovation process. If ideas arent built on with a sense of urgency, time can pass you by. This isnt just a problem for the government. Its a problem for everyone: The difficulty of making new ideas broadly available. And yet some ideas move quickly. Look at the progression of radio, television, the Internet, the iPod, Facebook. The acceleration in getting to millions of users has gone from 38 years to less than 4. Thats something that weve paid a lot of attention to: How do we increase the speed at DARPA?"

"The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way … It’s supposed to be hard. … Solving the problem must matter. It must instill a sense of urgency … And that urgency cannot be created in the abstract; it has to be real to inspire greater genius."

"DARPA was created in 1958, shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to reach space, sparking a national crisis in the United States. Concern that the Russians had achieved technological superiority led to the formation of the agency. Its founding mission was simple: "to prevent and create strategic surprise.”"

"You cant lose your nerve for the big failure because you need exactly the same nerve for the big success."

"To increase the speed of innovation here, we want to increase the number of people who can contribute ideas to the creative process. … We structure programs so that we can have diversity of involvement from universities to small businesses to large businesses to garage inventors. Youre looking for the maximum number of folks who can contribute ideas to the process. So were trying to catalyze and grab the best ideas no matter where they come from, leveraging the most modern concepts of crowdsourcing and harnessing creative power. Look at the semiconductor industry. Those companies could only keep up with Moores law by going from hundreds of chip designers focused on eking out every last electron, to hundreds of thousands of designers throughout the industry who could excel at various pieces of the design. When you open up the process like that, the number of people and the diversity of people who can participate goes way up."

"Our lives are so full of activity and "chatter" it’s difficult to find quiet time… Those are the moments that are the most creative for me. The location is less important than the choice to turn other things off. Because I find that the quietest times of my life speak the loudest."