Announcing the Research Leaders' Playbook

Tools and tactics for leading coordinated research programs

I’m excited to release something we’ve been working on for a long time: the Research Leaders Playbook. 

While there are many resources for people who want to start startups or run academic labs, tacit knowledge dominates how to start and run research efforts like ARPA programs, FROs, or what we do at Spectech: work that is beyond the scope of a single academic lab, but doesn’t make sense for a company or startup. By making it easier to lead ambitious research programs, we hope to encourage more people to start them, with all their wonderful downstream effects.

The playbook is a synthesis of ideas and wisdom from many people and domains — current and former ARPA program managers and directors; startups; academia; history; and more.  

ARIA supported the foundational work underpinning this public library – the genesis of this project was a playbook for running ARPA programs. We expanded the playbook from being focused on ARPA programs to covering what we’ve called ‘coordinated research programs’: a wide range of activities that nevertheless share enough important similarities that we can talk about them as a group. Over the past three months, we have been using the playbook as a reference text for the Brains Research Accelerator, which is culminating in just a few weeks.  

Of course, this is just the beginning. We'll continue updating the playbook as our collective knowledge about how to start and run coordinated research programs grows with the many new institutions that support them: the first FROs have not yet hit the five-year mark; ARIA released their first program solicitations only a few months ago; and ARPA-H has only been operating for a few years. We’re working on the infrastructure to enable public comments and suggest edits, but in the meantime, feel free to email comments or suggestions to info@spec.tech.

So dive in, get inspired, and let us know how we can keep improving. The future of transformative research depends on leaders like you. We can't wait to see what you'll achieve.