People, Places & Things: Network topology & motifs of R&D missions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a network framework to analyze the architecture of R&D programs, revealing their topological patterns and differences across thematic areas using data from ARPA-E.

Contribution

It develops a typed network model for R&D programs, enabling systematic comparison and monitoring of program structures and overlaps.

Findings

Programs exhibit distinct local structural patterns.

Overlap is more common among institutions than individual researchers.

Program fingerprints vary across thematic areas.

Abstract

Challenge-led R and D programs increasingly assemble heterogeneous people, organizations, funders, projects, and technical outputs around defined missions. Yet program evaluation often describes these systems through project lists, output counts, or retrospective case narratives. This article develops a typed network framework for representing R and D program architecture directly. We model programs as networks of people, places, and things: researchers, program directors, institutions, funders, publications, patents, projects, and citations. Applied to ARPA-E project impact sheets from the agency's first decade, the framework reconstructs 23 program-induced networks and an agency-level composed network. We show that R and D programs have an analysable topology: a typed arrangement of people, institutions, funders, projects, publications, patents, and citations that can be reconstructed, compared, and monitored. The analysis shows that programs can be compared by their local structural patterns, that cross-program overlap is concentrated more in recurring institutions than in individual researchers, and that program fingerprints differ across thematic areas. The article contributes to network science by extending topological analysis to R and D program systems, a class of governed, typed, and output-generating networks that has not been systematically represented in existing innovation-network work.