UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI
I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community.<p>As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around people applying, and it will just become another grant vehicle for academics in the publish-or-perish regime, and instead of "making something people want," in the venture model, it means, "find things nobody else understands well enough to care about." To people outside of it, it will look a lot like corruption.