Delay after delay. A high-profile director quitting before he even began. Controversies over funding, transparency and direction. It’s fair to say that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) has had a rough start, but with staff in place and funds ready to be spent, work is finally ready to begin. The question is, can ARIA ever inspire British tech innovation to the same heights as its US counterpart?
ARIA was first envisioned in 2017 as the UK version of DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is behind everything from GPS to voice recognition, drones, stealth aircraft and ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet. More recently, DARPA funded Moderna, the maker of one of the Covid vaccines.
Perhaps it didn’t help that the idea for ARIA was first revealed in a blog by former PM Boris Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings – he of the drive to Barnard Castle to check his eyesight – who argued that ARPA and Xerox’s PARC labs both showed a way forward for investment in innovation.
Over the course of several years, that idea has coalesced into an agency with an £800 million budget
