> "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down."

I mean, this is basically how all R&D works, everywhere, minus the strawman bit about "single fiscal year", which isn't functionally true.

And this is a serious career tip: you need to get good at this. Being able to break down extremely ambitious, many-year projects into discrete chunks that prove progress and value is a fundamental skill to being able to do big things.

If a group of very smart people said "give us ${BILLIONS} and don't bother us for 15 years while we cook up the next world-shaking thing", the correct response to that is "no thanks". Not because we hate innovation, but because there's no way to tell the geniuses apart from the cranks, and there's not even a way to tell the geniuses-pursuing-dead-ends from the geniuses-pursuing-real-progress.

If you do want to have billions and 15 years to invent the next big thing, you need to be able to break the project up to milestones where each one represents convincing evidence that you're on the right track. It doesn't have to be on an annual basis, but it needs to be on some cadence.