Very often innovations can happen if you fund accomplishing some previously unaccomplished task. Building a nuclear bomb, sending a man to the moon, decoding the genome. The innovations come about because you have smart people trying to solve something nobody has ever tried to solve before, and to do that they slightly revolutionize things.
I'm not aware of a single case where the goal was defined in terms of innovation itself, as in "find a better way to program" and anything useful or even slightly innovative resulted. They are by definition doing something that lots of people are trying to do all the time. It's just very unlikely that you are creating conditions which are novel enough to produce even a slightly new idea or approach.
Generally what you get is a survey of how things are currently done, and some bad ideas about how you could tweak the current state of affairs a little. But if there was a way to just patch up what we already know how to do then it's very likely someone already tried it, really it's likely 1000 people already tried it.