EPSRC announce 2008 Science and Innovation Awards
Gillian Pepper
Sunday, 21 December 2008 22:28 UTC
Interesting to note that this year’s Science and Innovation Awards are encouraging collaboration between organisations and across disciplines, with nano-electrics and synthetic biology in the mix:
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Replies
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Interesting that all funding are for application-directed projects, even though the discoveries that steamed the research often came up serendipitously, as it was for C-60 bucky-balls, carbon nanotubes (and more recently graphene? not sure here).
There could never be specific grants to promote serendipitous findings aniway, as obviously there is no way to make the unexpected happen at all. Although, the pressure on researcher to produce papers in order to apply for grants and secure enviable leading position in a given field is so great that i can hardly see much space left for chance there.
To cut a long drivel short, it seems to me that the only way to carry out basic science is to already have enough application-based projects funded in order to be able to afford some more on the sly, as it were.
Other than that, i do agree funding these collaborative projects seems like a sensitive way to promote innovation and develop new technologies, but fostering the initial spark is still the very hard part. Maybe there is a balance to be found.
What about allowing labs to save money from a funding, officially put say 5 % in a different pot that escapes the project’s deadline, to be used for basic stuffs?
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There is growing recognition of the importance of blue-skies research, but often to be eligable you must be quiet senior with a proven track record (ie. not an early career researcher which is maybe when we should be really encouraged to think outside the box)
A recent article in the THE, reported that (with respect to the Russell group) commercialisation of blue-skies research generated more that twice the average returns than applies research, with 8 out of the top 10 projects measured by financial return were the product of basic research.
Also UCL, has just announced a scheme, Venture Research Prize, to give its staff research grants without subjecting them to the peer review process of setting any deadlines or quotas as an attempt challenge the norm and potentially change the way we think about an important subject. The standard sought from applicants will be exceptionally high.
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Actually this came into my inbox and is specifically for early career researchers:
The European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Federation of National Academies of Sciences and the Humanities (ALLEA) invite the next generation of leading scholars (“early career researchers”) to participate in a three-day “new horizons” workshop in Vienna, Austria, from 8 – 10 June 2009.
Click here for more details.
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Thanks for the links Branwen, the first one doesn’t seem to work though.
About UCL’s Venture research prize, this is an interesting one. The initiative and the aims are to be praised, i am glad some one is willing to experiment a bit with that. They are tackling a really hard problem, ie the inherent limitations of the peer review process. Ideally, i think science will benefit from involving non-specialists in grant proposals and manuscripts reviewing process, if only people had the time to immerse themselves in other fields for a few hours or days once in a while. This is obviously very idealistic, considering, as someone pointed out in the “scientific red card” thread, that many scientists don’t even take the time to properly review paper from their peers. Unfortunately some fields are so competitive that more often than not other criteria than scientific objectivity get in the way.
In France there used to be a time when researcher at the CNRS would only be assessed every couple of years. They would have to show some progress since the last assessment. The amount of tax payer money (then the main source of funding and this procedure the main way of allocating it) allocated to a group (actually to the host institute, and then redistributed internally) would depend on how scientifically significant the progress would have been according to the assessors team, but you’d have to be damn lazy or very unlucky to be so unsuccessful as to get no money at all the next year. We are far from responsive mode grants here, maybe a balance between these two would be an improvement on both extremes.
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Not sure why the link didn’t work but here are the details.
Reach for the skies: applied research is half as lucrative
13 November 2008, By Hannah FearnI personally think that the entire system needs an overhaul, right down to PhD level. This is where you need to start enabling and encouraging people to develop and question their own ideas and it s really really difficult to do this in three years, particularly when a large amount of the funding (especially for medical research related projects) comes for a specific project devised by the supervisor to which you apply. So depending on you supervisor you never get a good chance to develop that side of things. And I think that just gets perpetuated through the system and then once you have proved yourself then you get the chance to push the boundaries.
I can’t really comment on the French system as I know too many young French academics (particularly in the humanities) who don’t have the nicest things to say about it.
Just for interest you might want to read this blog on virtual collaborations for an open call for a research project by Gavin Backer
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