My dissertation, Developmental Bureaucracy’s Hurdle at the Technological Frontier: Diffusion and Domestication of the ARPA Model in South Korea, exemplifies this research agenda and makes two primary contributions. First, it shows how institutional arrangements that previously enabled developmental states like South Korea to organize effective catch-up R&D programs become constraints as countries approach the technological frontier, generating systematic tensions between established governance structures and the demands of exploratory innovation. Second, it explains how domestic institutions modify or constrain the social mechanisms—such as delegated discretion and intermediary brokerage—through which state actors attempt to generate disruptive technological innovation.

 

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model has been celebrated for endowing state bureaucracies with the capability to explore highly uncertain technological opportunity space and to integrate early-stage research of dispersed actors toward novel technological visions. Its original instantiation, U.S. DARPA, played a central role in the development of transformative technologies such as the internet, GPS, and stealth aircrafts. Yet the model’s global diffusion is relatively recent: only since the 2010s have advanced economies, including South Korea, sought to emulate it as an institutional blueprint for frontier innovation. 

 

In this context, Korean state actors launched a series of large-scale ARPA-emulating R&D programs aimed at transitioning from technological catch-up to frontier innovation. Drawing on extensive archival materials and 67 interviews with administrative officials (senior- and working-level), scientists (program managers and principal investigators), and policy advisors/experts, I examine the challenges faced by these state actors and identify institutional barriers that constrain the organizational mechanisms associated with exploration into deeply uncertain technology while adapting them to entrenched bureaucratic and scientific practices.

 

The dissertation is organized into four chapters. The first develops an analytic framework by synthesizing fragmented scholarship to specify the core organizational features of the ARPA model and explore theoretically plausible factors that may shape its cross-national transferability. The remaining three empirical chapters examine how the model is modified across distinct institutional domains: state bureaucracy, profession, and the defense innovation system.

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