I am not sure what you mean by "defrayed" and may have misinterpreted your comment.-SWS wrote: When those grants are purely academic, philanthropic, or from government, then a good portion of front-end corporate risk is defrayed on those expensive research projects.
However, the fundamental economic laws of risk/benefit cannot be suspended through government or philanthropic financing.
In the case of government the risks and costs are transferred to a broad class of taxpayers (usually the unwitting taxpayers).
In the case of philanthropy it is of course the donors who bear the costs.
In either of these two cases the risk/benefit analysis should be clear to all parties before the investment is made.
Having organized some charitable fund raisers my experience with both large and small donors is they will cough up more money if they are first presented with a clear and credulous risk/benefit analysis.
With governments my experience has been that political favoritism often has more weight than risk/benefit.