[1] IARPA characterizes its mission as follows: "To envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage."

IARPA characterizes its mission as "to envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage".

In 1958, the first Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, was created in response to an unanticipated surprise—the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957.

As then-Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said, "I want an agency that makes sure no important thing remains undone because it doesn't fit somebody's mission."

The ARPA model has been characterized by ambitious technical goals, competitively awarded research led by term-limited staff, and independent testing and evaluation.

[10] Former director Jason Matheny has stated that the agency's goals of openness and external engagement serve to draw in expertise from academia and industry, or even individuals who "might be working in their basement on some data-science project and might have an idea for how to solve an important problem".

[citation needed] One such approach is cryogenic superconducting computing, which seeks to use superconductors such as niobium, rather than semiconductors, to reduce the energy consumption of future exascale supercomputers.

IARPA's MICrONS project seeks to reverse engineer one cubic millimeter of brain tissue and use insights from its study to improve machine learning and artificial intelligence.