When I was still talking to an ex-friend of mine a couple years ago, who is a "researcher". He told me with no irony that he and the rest of his colleages look at the Bill Gates millenium agenda (or some such name, I dont remember exactly) and start collecting results aligned with that agenda (his words) and they keep it aside until there is grant requests, and then jump on it and boom - in a week you have a whole research done.