[deong]

Another problem is that funding agencies have a very strong bias in favor of large projects. Most EU money gets poured into the big pools of money available only to research teams spanning three or more countries. It's incredibly difficult to propose a really novel, creative, innovative -- whatever adjective you like -- project that has 14 senior researchers and a small army of postdocs and grad students collaborating on it.

Those projects tend to come from individual researchers working on an idea, and there's basically no money available for that. For some fields, this isn't feasible, of course. You can't do high-energy experimental physics in your office with a laptop. But quite a lot of research can be at least partially done without massive amounts of support, and the system is set up in a way that more or less prevents that from happening.

[antognini]

This is also true. The time allocation committee for the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, has a policy that projects are judged solely on their scientific merit, without any regard to the amount of time being asked for. This, of course, leads to a strong bias towards very large projects.