Bring up the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in technology circles, and most people will think of the blue-sky research that the agency funds, like the work that spawned the Internet (see "DARPA's Disruptive Technologies,"). Bring up Intel, and a different image comes to mind: a not very imaginative research-and-development program that cranks out one Pentium processor after another. Great stuff, but hardly research capable of producing tomorrow's technological breakthroughs.

That could all change, as Intel's research director David Tennenhouse is engineering a sweeping overhaul of his organization, modeled largely on DARPA. Tennenhouse, who directed DARPA's Information Technology Office for three years before joining Intel in late 1999, says the problem is straightforward: although Intel will shell out more than $4 billion this year for R&D-ranking it among industry's top spenders-the company rarely ventures off the familiar semiconductor road map into emerging areas like ubiquitous computing, wireless networking and biological computing. But such "disruptive research," Tennenhouse says, is "the research that's going to lead to new business for Intel or open up areas that are going to jar the road map."