That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com
You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.
I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considering what came out of there.
From what I can tell, back in the 70's Xerox PARC's annual budget that focused on computing was $10-14.5 million in today's dollars, which seems fairly cheap. But it took multiple years to develop it.
This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
But it is inevitable to have a lot of unsuccessful research projects before one breakthrough. Similar to startups where most fail. Those "failures" add up to the cost pretty quickly, and you cannot avoid them.
