A few years ago, Anna Ponnampalam did something out-of-the-box. She entered a lottery. But she wasn’t buying scratch-off tickets promising cash for life. She was trying to win funding for her medical research.

Her application wasn’t successful. All proposals go through an initial quality and eligibility check, which hers did not pass; those that get to enter the pool then get selected at random for funding. But Dr. Ponnampalam, a reproductive biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, didn’t give up. She went on to win NZ $150,000 (US $96,000) from the Health Research Council of New Zealand in 2017 to study infertility, and the same amount in 2019 to study endometriosis.

“At first, I was in two minds about whether I should submit an application,” she says. “But now I think it’s quite a good idea to give out funding in this way to attract novel proposals, which often lead to big scientific discoveries.”

Since 2013, the New Zealand council has dedicated around 2 percent of its annual funding expenditure to what it calls explorer grants, asking applicants to submit proposals they think are “transformative, innovative, exploratory or unconventional, and have potential for major impact.” Such lotteries have been used in other countries, and some have the goal of increasing the diversity of grant recipients, as well as assisting researchers in earlier stages of their career who might struggle to find funding.