Ex-Pentagon Technologist May Regain the Stage
From Silicon Valley to Boston’s Route 128 to the Pentagon, the country’s most discriminating computer cognoscenti look at Craig Fields and wonder: “Is this guy going to return to power and influence in Washington? Or might he be just as effective remaining as chief executive of one of the country’s weirdest technology organizations?”
Fields, you may recall, ran the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--the Pentagon’s well-regarded high-technology development arm--until he was sacked in 1990 for championing “industrial policy” a little too aggressively for the Bush Administration’s taste.
Now, of course, the folks coming to Washington are a little more receptive to the idea of technology policy. Fields is rumored to be a prime candidate to run a new multibillion-dollar “dual use” DARPA--an agency that would effectively become the nation’s largest venture capital financier of both military and civilian breakthrough technologies.
“No comment,” says Fields, who spent 16 years at DARPA.
For the moment, the 45-year-old Fields--a brilliant and sometimes abrasive technologist--now runs the Microelectronics & Computer Technology Corp. (MCC) in Texas, the oddball organization that hired him shortly after his DARPA debacle. Fields didn’t exactly go into MCC with a silicon chip on his shoulder, but there is little question that he viewed his new organization as a medium for his competitiveness vision.
Of course, the private sector ain’t the Pentagon. But as MCC members might put it, you can take the Craig Fields out of DARPA, but you can’t take the DARPA out of Craig Fields.
When Fields arrived in 1990, MCC was an ambitious but confused 7-year-old organizational platypus--the nation’s first high-tech R&D; consortium. MCC melded researchers from companies such as Boeing, Digital Equipment, Rockwell International and 3M. The original MCC goal had been to foster cooperative technical development in electronics to better compete with those nasty Japanese keiretsu , or business conglomerates .
The result, alas, was a research hodgepodge with innovations that appealed more to technologists than the marketplace. Despite admirable goals and nifty technologies, the MCC consortium was less than the sum of its parts. Fields took over an organization that was becoming less relevant to its sponsors.
“The main lesson I learned is that consortia have to be based on rational business self-interest,” says Fields, who before joining MCC had worked only in the public sector. “Affection for cooperation as an organizational theology is not an effective enough reason for a business relationship. . . . I hadn’t appreciated the extent to which cooperation is countercultural in the business world.”
Rather ruthlessly, Fields swiftly slashed marginal research efforts, remaking both himself and MCC into agents of commercial innovation. MCC now has a venture capital arm to better spur transfer of technology from the drawing board to the market. Fields and the consortium now talk to their members’ customers and suppliers. MCC even has an enterprise integration program designed to create rich bandwidth networks that enable member companies to link with each other in commercially valuable ways--much as DARPA’s Internet enabled the nation’s universities to communicate by computer.
“I realized,” says Fields, “the absolute criticality of linking the technology agenda to the business agenda. The idea that technology linked to business hurts the technology development is simply wrong. Technology development is helped by being linked to real markets and real products.”
Indeed, says Fields, who once supervised some of the Pentagon’s biggest technical breakthroughs: “Time to market, price and quality are usually more important than the breakthrough product in high-tech industries.”
It’s still not clear, however, whether MCC is on the margins, the mainstream or the cutting edge of technology. But don’t think for a moment that Fields views his MCC mission purely in traditional business contexts of technical tactics and innovation strategies. He has launched the First Cities initiative, an ambitious effort to bring new telecommunications infrastructures to urban America. He wants to position MCC as a builder of new infrastructures; an intellectual venture capital broker. Of course, that’s what he did at DARPA.
“I think we do want to reach out to the national labs to facilitate the spinoff of companies to help our members,” says Fields. “I’d like to see the same thing for key universities.”
Fields is particularly interested in involving MCC in the effort to help the nation’s defense industry adjust to the post-Cold War era of sharply lower Pentagon spending.
“The large defense-conversion problem is beyond our scope,” says Fields, “but in regions experiencing defense conversion, we could play a helpful role facilitating start-ups and commercial technology transfer.” He is aware that the Clinton transition teams might find that attitude appealing.
Fields insists that MCC is uniquely positioned to help set the new public/private technology competitiveness agenda. “This consortium offers a constantly evolving model of how to manage technology development while developing new markets,” says Fields. MCC isn’t just an engine of technology; it’s his bully pulpit.
But while Fields has succeeded in boosting MCC’s technical and public profile, there’s little question that he wants his vision to play across a broader stage. Two years at MCC has sharpened his awareness, abilities and aspirations. “My MCC experience and DARPA experience are complementary,” he acknowledges. “But you can’t copy DARPA into the private sector.”
Then again, why make a copy if you can run the original?
Michael Schrage is a writer, consultant and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes this column independently for The Times.
