How research grants are like competitive diving

Research grant competitions are competitive. Really competitive.

Funding agencies are seeing an increase in the number of applications and an increase in the average amount requested per application. But no increase in their own core budgets.

Success rates in Canada are in the 30% range for social science and humanities application. This is high compared to the US and UK.

How do you react?

Are you afraid to think big in case you don’t get the money? Do you go for the next easiest thing you could do? Are you trying to find the safe option?

This is understandable. You don’t want to aim high and fail. Planning a big ambitious project and then having to do the small thing because you didn’t succeed feels like a failure in a way that planning a smaller project, doing it, and producing results doesn’t.

The easy dives don’t win medals

In competitive diving, each dive has a level of difficulty assigned to it. The judges rate your performance and then adjust your final score based on the level of difficulty.

If you attempt harder dives your risk of failure is higher. More can go wrong. But if you pull it off, you are in with a real chance of winning a medal.

As a competitive strategy, easy dives are not going to win you any medals even if they are all performed perfectly.

The paradox

When you dampen your ambitions, you increase your risk of being in that group that is deemed excellent but for whom the funder just doesn’t have enough funds to fund.

Objectively, your project is a good one, well designed and likely to succeed. But your proposed contribution to knowledge while important is not significant enough to rank up near the top. You didn’t attempt a difficult dive so although you executed it well, you are in the middle of the ranking.

When only 15-30% of all applicants get funding, competent projects in the middle of the field don’t get funding.

The paradox is that, in trying to avoid disappointment and discouragement, you start to think that if can’t get funding for this “safe” project, you might as well give up any hope of ever doing anything ambitious.

And yet the ambitious project, if well designed, would have a higher chance of ranking in the fundable range.

Think bigger

If you knew you would have whatever resources you need, what would you really like to be researching?

Sketch out a plan of how that would work: what sources would you use? what questions would you investigate? where would you publish the results?

Now, what is the best thing to do to lay a solid foundation for that big project? That’s what you do with your start-up funds, seed-funding, or development grant.

Where does that go next? Given the parameters of the particular funding competition, what is the best thing you can do to take that bigger project forward?

If at first you don’t succeed, what can you be doing in the meantime so that your next application is different (and better)? I don’t mean how can you write the application differently, I mean what will you be able to write about that is different:

• have you published more?
• have you conducted preliminary research?
• have you validated your data collection instruments?
• have you piloted your analytic techniques?
• have you extended your literature review?

Don’t let the grant deadline drive your process

You aren’t doing this work to get a grant.

You are getting a grant to do the work.

Many grant competitions are annual. Strategic funding opportunities come up regularly. Plan your project so that you can respond quickly to opportunities as they arise with a high quality project.

In other words, now is already too late to start planning for an autumn 2011 grant deadline. Now is a great time to start planning for 2012.

I can help.

I’m busy with the October 2011 competition deadline right now, but starting in a couple of week’s I’ll have appointments available for Grant Proposal Development meetings with those preparing to apply for funding in 2012. My prices are probably going up in January, so having your initial meeting now will also save you money.

Book now to for late September.