Incentives, and the corresponding KPIs, are always a good place to start looking if one is trying to find out why systems and people behave the way they do.
When I read the title I thought the paper was about business ideas and similar things. Having quickly read the paper, citations is a likely reason for, what the authors called, me too science.
Well, yeah, but bold is nearly impossible to tell from crazy, and people really don't like being told that "actually, the most efficient management technique in this case is to throw money randomly at a lightly-filtered set of projects."
People want to believe that blue-sky research can be predicted, managed, and optimized, no matter the staggering mountains of evidence to the contrary.
That seems to problem, doesn't it? How to identify the truly crazy ideas from the simply bold ones. Especially as nobody "gets fired to buy IBM", which kind of applies to everything from buying and hiring, over startup funding all the way to research.
When I read the title I thought the paper was about business ideas and similar things. Having quickly read the paper, citations is a likely reason for, what the authors called, me too science.
Maybe it's time to be more bold.