Re:Hard Startups
by mattkrause on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @09:44PM
(#22429893)
I’m not sure that’s really true.
The NIH budget is about $40B, 90 percent of which goes to research via about 50,000 extramural grants and the NIH’s own intramural research program. Very little of this is expected to “work” in the sense that it produces an immediate improvement in human health. Same goes for the NSF. The DoE, NASA, and DoD also fund plenty of research beyond the ARPAs (DARPA, IARPA, HSARPA, etc).
The ARPA programs are outliers in that they’re more likely to take larger risks in exchange for bigger rewards, while the NIH (etc) are more incremental. Nevertheless, it’s not true that these programs try to avoid ‘failures’ at all costs.
The NIH budget is about $40B, 90 percent of which goes to research via about 50,000 extramural grants and the NIH’s own intramural research program. Very little of this is expected to “work” in the sense that it produces an immediate improvement in human health. Same goes for the NSF. The DoE, NASA, and DoD also fund plenty of research beyond the ARPAs (DARPA, IARPA, HSARPA, etc).
The ARPA programs are outliers in that they’re more likely to take larger risks in exchange for bigger rewards, while the NIH (etc) are more incremental. Nevertheless, it’s not true that these programs try to avoid ‘failures’ at all costs.