What are your thoughts on this model of promoting breakthrough innovation?
How to fund Breakthrough Innovations in Science (Puja Ohlhaver @ DeSci.Berlin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24
Puja has a few talks on such things, many very related and worth listening to imho. But most relevant: she's been working on a mechanism design to use quadratic funding in an existing hierarchy to move funding power from funders to on-the-ground researchers who best predict "breakthrough research" areas -- i.e. at which intersections. This idea of "breakthrough innovation" is objectively measured and rewarded as "research that becomes highly cited, and which draws together disparate source citations that have never before appeared together."
So the idea is that in successive funding rounds, funding power slowly accrues in the people who best predict where research innovation will appear. Even if that turns out to be *gasp* grad students.
(I'm particularly interested to see Polis, a "wiki survey" tool I've been using since 2016, be used as one of the signals in such a system. It can help make the landscape of beliefs and feelings that ppl bring to the process more legible, especially at the collective level. Which is important, because high-dimensional "feeling data", when placed out-of-scope in other systems, are often a reason why we get trapped in local minima of innovation that inhibit the recombination of ideas.)