| I think the intention is to fund riskier investments that traditional VC would turn its nose up to and say "come back with an MVP and a customer". The internet is probably a cliche example, but it came out of DARPA as a resilient control network for the military. Nobody at the time envisaged the impact it would have - it was an interesting technical piece of work that scratched an itch. Funding it resulted in a huge economic and strategic benefit for the US. It makes sense for other countries to attempt to replicate this model. Being able to strategically fund technically interesting (but highly adventurous) moon-shots is not really attempting to out-perform VCs - the goal is to evaluate and fund a portfolio of crazy (but credible) ideas, accepting they may fail, and that they won't run according to nice quarterly deliverable schedules, as things will go wrong. Academic funding is very broken to begin with, as it focuses so hard on reducing the risk of projects that non-delivery (i.e. negative outcomes) are frowned upon or not tolerated (depending on the field) - this is a very unhealthy set of incentives. We should allow research to fail and return negative results, and not penalise the researchers. Not everything will work. Especially for early career researchers, they might be over-optimistic about how long something will take. Researchers are trained to be so risk-averse that they are often seeking grant funding for work they've already done, in order to reduce (to near-zero) the risk of non-delivery. They then use that grant funding to tide over doing innovative research on the side, or doing the majority of the de-risking of it, in order ot be ready to bid for future funding for that idea, keeping the conveyor belt moving. But you have to find a way to get onto the conveyor belt and get started running on it. Hopefully this research approach will embrace failure and delayed delivery for good reason, and focus instead on what can be learned, rather than on having low-skilled box-tickers focused on managing other people's projects - the two hallmaks of current govt funded research. |