Generally speaking, a project could easily take years, even a decade or more, from PowerPoint presentation to approval, implementation, and results.
Most research projects did not go from approval to bearing fruit. They went from selling dreams to being canceled halfway through. Whether the higher-ups or investors saw through your tricks, or they went under before the project did, either could bring an early end to your ongoing research.
That was reality. The people who started the project might have been waiting for that day for a long time. After all, once the research funds had been spent, there was no need to audit the accounts anymore.
In fact, even those who worked honestly had their own ways of playing the game. They would set up multiple research projects—three or four at the low end, over a dozen at the high end—but most of them were shell projects. A couple of students ran a tiny lab, while the advisor occasionally dropped by to check on progress. It was all just to swindle funding.
And if they were not outright academic frauds, then one primary project would likely devour the resources of most of the others—manpower, facilities, funding, equipment. Under the project approval systems of investors and R&D departments, obtaining the greatest possible resources was instead the researcher's foremost task.
Especially in this world, where the existence of supernatural principles made all research far too unpredictable. It was difficult for investors to tell whether your research had truly failed due to bad luck, or whether you had been scamming them for investment from the very beginning.
This was especially true of outsourced projects like this, where the ability involved was one of a kind and the circumstances were too unusual. Sometimes, even if you sent a professional team to keep an