It might be an interesting idea to instead take your massive budget, divide it into 10 pieces, and hire 10 independent teams to implement it. Just pick out of whichever ones are actually finished on time.
On the other hand, I don’t see how you could pull this off in an adversarial environment incentive-wise. If everybody gets paid, a winning strategy during the contract is to not really try; if only the winner gets paid, a winning strategy when choosing the contract is to avoid everything that looks even slightly risky. Supposedly there’s a whole not-a-Nobel-prize-winning theory of auctions—I wonder if it has something to say here.
You pay everyone to participate and you give a bonus to the winner. People who don't make a reasonable effort won't get selected to participate next time.
So here's an article[0] Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox in 2014 about prizes to incentivize pharmaceutical research, rather than patents. I don't think this is where I first read about this (because I wasn't reading Vox in 2014), but I think either he or Ezra Klein talking about it on a podcast may be where I first came across it. Here's the summary of the idea from there:
> A large cash prize creates an incentive to innovate just as much as a patent does, but offers several important advantages.
It's very possible that this is really only relevant to scientific endeavors that pop out patents, rather than anything that is currently grant-funded. But I generally like this idea of big incentives to find an answer to something, rather than micro-managing the funding allocated to different proposed avenues of research toward an answer. I hate that all the PIs I know spend over half their time writing proposals, when they could just be researching.
Here are a couple deeper links to economists writing about it (from that article)[1][2].
[0]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/9/5788630/4-radical-ideas-for-pro... [1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/me... [2]: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/prizes--not-pat...
This approach is essentially an evolutionary strategy, and I would think twice about accusing nature of waste.