You are typing this with software built on top of an incredibly vast technology stack which simply would not exist without federal R&D funding. May be worth remembering this fact. In the next few hours, you will almost certainly use non-digital technology essential to life which simply did not originate from commercial R&D (such as it is).
The beginning is nearly always federal R&D funding. Much of it won't work, sure, and that's fine. It's not wasted, because when it works, it creates such a massive everlasting surplus and opportunity machine that it overcomes all past failures by orders of magnitude. Such as, computers, and all they enabled over the last 100-ish years.
The myth of the lone inventor in the garage should have been updated even in the pre-WW2 era.
When it's VCs investing private money, on a high risk, high return (to private individuals) that's celebrated. The recipients (aka founders) will mostly lose that "grant" money, and end up with nothing to show for it. Of course the winners produce massive economic gains to the general public.
Alas when the govt follows the exact same model, taking high risk, high reward bets, then it's seen as "wasteful spending". Despite the staggering value of the wins, it becomes better to "spend nothing" than waste a penny on research that goes nowhere.
The levels of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, are truly incredible.
And the charge is being lead by someone who literally made his wealth from this model.
DoD Office of Strategic Capital is high risk, the kind of risk no investors would fund.
Investors scrutinize pitch decks and then do hard company due diligence which frequently falls through. And conversations die-off with no obligation to provide feedback, unlike in government. And investors will not fund true R&D. They fund scale.
None of these agencies fund high-risk grants. I don't think there is such a thing. What you're talking about is the difficult-to-quantify relationship between a define advance in knowledge, and possible commercial applications.
The beginning is nearly always federal R&D funding. Much of it won't work, sure, and that's fine. It's not wasted, because when it works, it creates such a massive everlasting surplus and opportunity machine that it overcomes all past failures by orders of magnitude. Such as, computers, and all they enabled over the last 100-ish years.
The myth of the lone inventor in the garage should have been updated even in the pre-WW2 era.