Because of the inherently uncertain return on investment, blue-sky projects are sometimes politically and commercially unpopular and tend to lose funding to research perceived as being more reliably profitable or practical.
Braben controversially challenged peer review as the mechanism for establishing funding, emphasizing the selection of researchers whose proposals "could radically change the way we think about something important.
[3]When UK research councils introduced a requirement that grant application include a 2-page statement on the economic impact of the proposed work, 20 scientists, including 1996 Nobel laureate Sir Harold Kroto, wrote a public letter to Times Higher Education condemning the requirement and calling for peer reviewers to ignore the additional documentation.
The award was to fund "research which is considered to be original and exciting but lacks a sufficient evidence base in the literature to be supported by traditional grant schemes.
It has sometimes been concerned with topics such as unexplained phenomena and the impact of future technologies upon society, asking questions such as "How would a spacecraft traverse a black hole and where would it arrive upon leaving it?"