Funding for scientific research has become risk-averse, favoring established researchers pursuing incremental discoveries

See Stagnant Scientific Productivity Holding Back Growth by Greg Ip of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"the U.S. already spends plenty on R&D, about 3% of gross domestic product in recent years. That exceeds the peaks of the early 1960s during the space race. But the fruits of that effort have been elusive. Total factor productivity, the best metric for innovation’s contribution to growth, grew just 0.5% a year over the past decade, half its rate of the 1960s. Other evidence suggests breakthroughs, such as new drug discoveries, are becoming more expensive and time-consuming, and researchers spend ever more years acquiring training and experience before achieving novel discoveries."

"Research inputs—dollars and hours spent—are a lousy measure of innovation"

"The most innovative companies aren’t necessarily the biggest spenders. Tesla Inc.’s R&D spending in the past three years is 13% of that of General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. combined. Yet Tesla’s market value is more than five times its two rivals’."

"institutions that fund science have become process-oriented, narrow-minded and risk-averse. Wary of failure, they favor established researchers pursuing narrowly focused, incremental ideas over younger scientists with more heterodox agendas."

"George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, and University of California, Berkeley bioengineering professor Patrick Hsu . . .  in April, 2020 launched Fast Grants, $10,000 to $500,000 awards funded primarily by private donors and approved in 14 days or less." [along with Patrick Collison co-founder of payments technology company Stripe Inc.]

"Among the projects they backed: a saliva-based Covid test that worked as well as nose swabs by a team at Yale University that, they said, couldn’t get timely funding from their own school."

"57% [of grant recipients] told them they spent more than a quarter of their time on grant applications"

"Heidi Williams, an economist at Stanford University and director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, said grants typically commit a scholar to complete a specific project, even if during the research the project proves less promising than expected. Better, she said, to abandon that project and let the researcher redeploy their capital and labor to a problem closer to the frontier of science. This would likely result in more failed projects but, hopefully, more breakthroughs."

"In a 2009 paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Pierre Azoulay and his co-authors demonstrated the benefits of funding people over projects. Researchers backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which takes such an approach, produce far more widely cited papers—a metric of significance—than similar researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health."