There has been no shortage of advice regarding how the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) might reinvent itself to improve the utility, relevance, and impact of the research it funds. Nor is there a lack of efforts to glean lessons from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), some of which are referenced within this report. This brief complements this other work by (a) reviewing what scholars and policymakers have learned about DARPA and other agencies modeled on it, and (b) applying that learning to education research and its contexts, with the goal of informing the design and implementation of a National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE). In the next section, the authors provide a brief overview of key features of DARPA and ARPA-E. They then summarize some key themes from their reviews of materials related to DARPA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), discussing their implications for NCADE and other innovation-oriented education research agencies. This discussion of implications can inform the work of IES and the other federal agencies with which IES collaborates. The authors conclude the report with some questions that remain open and that will need to be considered as NCADE is designed and implemented. Although the primary audience is the set of federal agencies that support education research, this brief could be of interest to the broader community of education policymakers, practitioners, and researchers as they work together to envision new models of education research and development.