Commentary on provisions of Act The Advanced Research and Invention Agency Section 3: Ambitious research, development and exploitation: tolerance to failure
This section states that in exercising its functions, ARIA’s may give particular weight to the potential for significant benefits to be achieved or facilitated through scientific research, or the development and exploitation of scientific knowledge, that carries a high risk of failure.
	ARIA may set highly ambitious research goals which, if achieved, would bring about transformative scientific and technological advances. These advances would yield significant economic and social benefit. As these goals may be highly ambitious it is likely that only a small fraction would be fully realised. The Act allows ARIA to have a high tolerance to project failure.
	The ambitious research goals may require multi-year programmes of work where pay-back may be highly uncertain and success may not be realised for some years. It is likely that at least a proportion of projects are ones that would not be undertaken by other bodies. ARIA may fund work in areas which are untested and untried, but where it has identified opportunities that best suit its ambitious research goals.
	In performing these functions, the forms of support undertaken by ARIA may themselves carry high risk, for example, taking equity stake in a start-up company.
	Although ambitious research goals might not ultimately be achieved, ARIA will take value from project failures, including spillover benefits gained from intermediary outputs. For example, a particular goal may not prove achievable but, in pursuing it, scientific challenges may be partially solved, with wider application, or promising areas of future inquiry and technology development may be identified.
	Furthermore, in pursuing highly ambitious research goals, ARIA will be able to bring together high-calibre individuals and bodies from across the public and private sector R&D communities which might not otherwise have been brought together. These connections may endure, spurring future innovation under the leadership of ARIA or others.