I think what you need to do is get a list of priorities of people's needs in your society that might be accessible to scientific technology if research of various kinds were done.
However, mission-directed science is by no means everything. There has to be a basic understanding of things. That's the way great projects develop. We wouldn't have contemporary molecular medicine had it not been for the fact that in the early 20th century, instead of going straight ahead with trying to use genetics to do something about human health, Thomas Morgan investigated fruit flies.
Mission is not everything.