One route to innovation, the importance of good managers
Program managers design programs to be high-risk aggregations of lower-risk projects.
and,
At the end of the day the ARPA Model depends on badass program managers. Why is this the case? PMs need to think for themselves and go up and down the ladder of abstraction in an unstructured environment. On top of that they need to be effective communicators and coordinators because so much of their jobs is building networks
from Why does DARPA work