Outgoing DARPA chief champions failure as key to advancing technology

Regina Dugan, the departing leader of DARPA, the Pentagon's research wing, made an impassioned pitch for failure at a recent conference hosted by the non-profit group TED, whose mission is to promote ideas worth spreading. Though Dugan recently announced she is leaving her post for a position at Google, in her talk, "From Mach-20 Glider to Humming Bird Drone," she discussed DARPA's recent developments, including a robot that can run like a cheetah, and the agency's greatest hits, such as the Internet. Championing the scientists and engineers at DARPA, Dugan also stressed that the agency's success comes from not fearing failure. "When you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible," she said. "The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way."