Funding strategies are seldom reviewed. But note, there is a new paper in Nature “Follow the money” with an result that I find plausible:
In general, we find that sponsors who concentrate funds in fewer institutions have lower research impact as measured by early-citation counts. It may well be that when groups from multiple institutions vie for funding, competition increases, review processes become less partial and more promising projects are selected.
So, funding should not be concentrated too much (and together with an earlier finding here from the Ig Noble prize 2010) it even doesn’t matter whom to fund ;-)