thanks Richard, I followed your link and found food for thought:
=====quote=====
Relevance: Proposals should be topical, foundational, and unconventional.
Topical: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is limited to research in physics (mainly quantum physics, high energy "fundamental" physics, and gravity), cosmology (mainly of the early universe) and closely related fields (such as astrophysics, astrobiology, biophysics, mathematics, complexity and emergence, and philosophy of physics), insofar as the research bears directly on questions in physics or cosmology. Although the distribution of funds across subject areas will be driven in large part by the quality of proposals received, a goal of the review process will be to fund diverse research topics that span the small and the large, and range from the elementary to the complex.
Foundational: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is limited to research with potentially significant and broad implications for our understanding of the deep or "ultimate" nature of reality.
Unconventional: This Inaugural Request for Proposals is intended to fill a gap, not a shortfall, in conventional funding. We wish to enable research that, because of its speculative, non-mainstream, or high-risk nature, would otherwise go unperformed due to lack of available monies. Thus, although there will be inevitable overlaps, an otherwise scientifically rigorous proposal that is a good candidate for an FQXi will generally not be a good candidate for funding by the NSF, DOE, etc. - and vice versa.
...
...
INITIAL PROPOSAL - DUE April 2, 2006 - Must include:
A 300 - 500 word summary of the project, explicitly addressing why it is topical, foundational and unconventional
A draft budget description not exceeding 200 words, including an approximate total cost and explanation of how funds would be spent
A Curriculum Vitae for the Principal Investigator, in PDF format, including:
Education and employment history
Five previous publications relevant to the proposed research, and five additional representative publications
Full publication list
======endquote======
I won't comment on the issue that you raised about restriction to Academia.
Whether or not that restriction makes sense (especially for their maiden venture) there are already quite a lot of people in Academia who have UNCONVENTIONAL ideas they want to work on that are not likely to get funded by either DOE or NSF.
By saying "non-mainstream, high-risk, speculative" they are already inviting a lot of rather unconventional stuff.
In the US research community almost any non-string Quantum Gravity is unlikely to get DOE or NSF funding and for this reason it could be considered as high-risk to embark on non-string QG research.
There is a lot else besides. They could find themselves getting plenty of proposals submitted----that they then have to review and decide which ones to invite to the second round submissions.
And my bandwidth isn't enough to do both. Maybe over the weekend.