Research oriented government agencies already sometimes give grants to private organizations (corporations, typically) for largish chunks of work-- climate tech startups get nontrivial amounts of project funding from organizations like NRECA for example. Do these grants work better than grants to PIs? That seems worth finding out. Similar, though less research oriented, is the phenomenon of "Beltway bandit" companies whose revenue comes mostly from defense contracts-- I suspect that for better or worse, the incentive structure faced by grant seeking labs in your proposed model would come to resemble these.

Slightly tangentially: I have so many questions about that Irish population graph, like:

-- That is a huge population growth rate between 1800 and 1840 before the famine. What was going on there? I graphed it vs a few other European countries and while many of them were growing steadily during that period, nobody else had that high a percentage of growth (54% growth in 40 years if I'm doing the math right) except the UK, which has a crazy quick and apparently unrelated knee upward in the graph in 1810-1820. Was that just a time when both Ireland and the now-UK lands escaped the Malthus trap sooner than everyone else?

-- Then after the famine deaths and emigration wave, there's a long steady decline that seems to be levelling off around 1920-- but then drops again, quite quickly, so that the population declines another 25% or so between 1920 and 1930. I can't help thinking it must be related somehow to the Irish Free State gaining independence in 1922; but if OWiD had suddenly stopped counting the Northern Ireland population as part of Ireland at that date, I'd expect an even more abrupt decline. Was it emigration of the Protestant minority in the south to the UK? Economic hardship associated with independence? Something else?