It seems from an article that the funding agencies were pleased with the return they got from an "ideas" portfolio. Maybe more ideas failed, but the projects th

It seems from an article that the funding agencies were pleased with the return they got from an "ideas" portfolio. Maybe more ideas failed, but the projects that succeeded did so in more spectacular ways — a bit like a VC portfolio. The problem, it seems to me, is similar to VC: The funding agencies can spread their risk across a pool of ideas, but the investigators generally have to commit to one or a small number of projects for some time, so they risk spending several years without much to show for it if the idea fails.