The phrase "an ambitious exercise" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a task or activity that requires significant effort, determination, or skill to achieve a challenging goal.
Example: "The project was an ambitious exercise in creativity, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible."
Alternatives: "a challenging endeavor" or "a bold undertaking".
Attempting to impose a common cost-benefit framework on many such possibilities so that they can be meaningfully compared one with another is an ambitious exercise, to put it mildly.
Of the two novels available in English, "The Journey" seems to me the greater work, an ambitious exercise in the collective stream-of-consciousness that tries to eavesdrop on the babble of an entire little world.
Notwithstanding Rwanda's reputation as an authoritarian state, Professor Anastase Shyaka, chief executive of the country's governance board, described the project as an ambitious exercise in democratic government, allowing every citizen a voice.
Achieving agreement among more than 200 department and agency representatives over 10 months of often-torturous negotiations was "a heroically ambitious exercise," said a senior administration official who participated in the process.
Whether or not his clients are socially concerned, for Mr. Bowes reverse graffiti is just the start of a more ambitious exercise.
An especially ambitious exercise in the narrative genre was Craig Raine's History: The Home Movie (1994), a huge semifictionalized saga, written in three-line stanzas, chronicling several generations of his and his wife's families.
Military officials have begun planning for a far more ambitious exercise in 2006 in Parry Channel, 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
He has also launched an ambitious rebranding exercise, masterminded not by a French PR agency but by the British lobby firm Bell Pottinger.
In that study, those who embarked on more ambitious exercise programs did gain additional risk reduction, as seems only fair, but the benefits plateaued rapidly.
In October, the Army completed its most ambitious exercise with the deployment of 17 Strykers to India for a two week exercise which included live firing of a combined mechanized task force for the first time.
In that other current, more ambitious exercise in septuagenarian star power, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty," Ms. Stritch creates at least an illusion that she is, if you will, exposing herself.
