“People misunderstand how creative scientists and engineers are. They’re very much like artists, just in a different realm. Scientists and engineers imagine things that don’t exist, and then they set about making those ideas come to reality.”
The first woman director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Regina E. Dugan has long emphasized creative responses to challenging problems. As a leader, she encourages others to aspire toward goals that seem just out of reach, arguing that great success only comes by accepting the possibility of failure.