Indeed. You do need some idea of what you are going to do before being funded.
The tricky bit is that in research, and this a bit like the act of programming, you often discover import stuff in the process of doing - and the more innovative the area - the more likely this is to happen.
Big labs deal with this by having enough money to self-fund prospective work, or support things for extra time - the real problem is that new researchers - who often have the new ideas, are the most constrained.
If you work at a large company, it could consider 1,000's of different new major features or new products. But it only has the budget to pay for 50 per year.
So obviously there's a whole process of presentations, approvals, refinement, prototypes, and whatnot to ensure that only the best ideas actually make it to the stage where a programmer is working on it.
Same thing with a startup, but it's the founders spending months and months trying to convince VC's to invest more, using data and presentations and whatnot.
It's not a problem -- it's the foundation of any organization that spends money and wants to try new things.
The tricky bit is that in research, and this a bit like the act of programming, you often discover import stuff in the process of doing - and the more innovative the area - the more likely this is to happen.
Big labs deal with this by having enough money to self-fund prospective work, or support things for extra time - the real problem is that new researchers - who often have the new ideas, are the most constrained.