Necessity is the mother of innovation/invention. If we aren't trying to achieve a goal, we won't come across problems that need innovations as the solutions. You can't spend billions of dollars on just "researching new inventions," you won't invent anything. By trying to get to the moon, problems arose, and the solutions to those problems ended up benefiting us. Just giving someone a billion dollars and saying "make inventions" isn't gonna get us anything, because he doesn't have a problem to solve.