Having an organization maintain a software tool seems pretty unsurprising. There’s a well-defined problem with easily visible deliverables, relatively little research risk, and small organizations routinely maintain software tools all the time. Whereas broader research is full of risk and requires funders be enormously patient and willing to fund crazy ideas that don’t make sense.

Hmm. I don't know very much about Lean, and it definitely feels smaller in scope and coordination risk than the kinds of things that would generally benefit from this.

(OTOH, within the community they're effectively trying to build a massive, modern Principia Mathematica, so maybe they would...)

> Whereas broader research is full of risk and requires funders be enormously patient and willing to fund crazy ideas that don’t make sense.

Yah. I'm not a researcher, but I keep ending up tangentially involved in research communities. I've seen university labs, loose research networks, loose consortia funding research centers, FFRDC, etc.

What I’ve noticed is that a lot of these consortia or networks struggle to deliver anything cohesive. There's too many stakeholders, limited bandwidth, and nobody quite empowered to say “we’re building this.”

In the cases where there’s a clearly scoped, tractable problem that’s bigger than what a single lab can handle, and a group of stakeholders agrees it’s worth a visionary push, something like an FRO might make a lot of sense.