agree, I think we could make a really strong pitch like. "We're covering the development costs, this will be funding and demonstrating FANTASTIC communication / interface design / user testing"

Agreed. I suspect that the flavor of a grant application will be informed by the next couple of experiments... It seems like it will also happen after our Retreat, so we could use the grant application as a focal point within the retreat (i.e. have it as a stream :) )