India, Nov. 16 -- During World War II, the US military funded one of the most absurd experiments in defence research, Project Pigeon. Conceived by the psychologist B.F. Skinner, the idea was to train pigeons to peck at the image of an enemy ship projected inside a missile's nose cone, thus steering the bomb toward its target. The birds performed flawlessly in trials. Yet the Pentagon balked at trusting a $25,000 warhead to a pigeon. The project was quietly abandoned, ingenious in design, but irrelevant in outcome. It is a story that perfectly captures the perils of mistaking experimentation for impact.

As India begins to invest more heavily in research and frontier technologies, it becomes important how well we can trace what that spendi...