Event Details

With great pleasure, we have Dr. Jian Wang here to present his insights on How Novelty and Feasibility Inform Research Funding Decisions. This will be held in Mngt School Dormer LT14 WPA002 from 12:00-13:00.

Novel work entails known risks. When they published new ideas, their work has a greater likelihood of being a “hit,” but also a “flop.” The same is also true of new ideas proposed to funding agencies. To counteract these tendencies, agencies like the German Research Foundation have developed programs to expressly support innovative, risky research. Our investigation of one such program, the Reinhart Koselleck Projects programme, makes two contributions to existing scholarship on novelty and risk in science. First, we go beyond the track record of the applicant and examine the novelty of the proposed project as well. Second, we integrate the idea of feasibility into our conceptual model. We develop a measure of project feasibility and assess how it might moderate the effect of novelty on the likelihood of funding. Our analysis of all proposals submitted to this programme since 2008 reveals no significant penalties against novel proposals, or against applicants with a track record of novel research, although a significant interaction effect reveals that novel proposals submitted by applicants with a history of producing novel research are less likely to be funded. As expected, feasible projects are more likely to win funding. Furthermore, feasibility mitigates the perception penalty against novel applicants. That is, only when feasibility is low, applicants with a higher share of novel publications are less likely to get funding. As the first empirical study to measure and incorporate feasibility, we discuss how it, and its interaction with project novelty, informs funding decisions, and share implications for research evaluation more broadly.