Funding the Future: The Push for New Approaches to Research Funding
Nov. 12, 2024—Just like the ideas fueling research projects, research funding doesn’t always follow a formula. Funding structures that are open and flexible can help make creative, potentially transformative research a reality. A new publication from the EU is trying to do just that—highlighting funding strategies designed to disrupt the status quo and advance research more quickly.
Current challenges
“Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, Technology, and Innovation to Boost European Competitiveness” examines the EU research and innovation landscape and provides recommendations to enhance the Horizon Europe program and consider future R&D investments. Research and innovation seen as the key to addressing current challenges like national security, complex geopolitics, and war. There are also unknowns associated with new technologies; in the context of rapidly evolving technology like AI and quantum, the speed required to address policy, regulatory, and funding challenges must match the pace of R&D.
The report seeks to boost European competitiveness and strengthen research investment, impact, and innovation by aligning policies, boldly ramping up innovation, and accelerating research translation and commercialization. But these challenges are not exclusive to the EU. The United States and other countries face similar issues as they seek to strengthen and improve research frameworks to better leverage innovation and address societal challenges.
The rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic proved that leveraging public funding to put industry and academic creative talent to work—while reducing regulatory friction—can unleash discovery and translation. That’s the premise underlying UIDP’s Strengthen and Modernize U-I Partnerships initiative, launched in September to address the need to strengthen cross-sector partnerships through bold new approaches to dramatically increase the impact from collaborative innovation.
Report recommendations
The EU report emphasizes the need to align efforts and priorities across governments and agencies, as well as funding collaborative research, increasing the number of public-private partnerships, and promoting researchers’ cross-sector mobility. It also urges increased spending on research and the establishment of an experimental unit to test new programs. It offers examples of unique programs from around the world for the unit to try, from ARPA-like agencies to prize competitions. The report provides a dozen recommendations for restructuring and rethinking conventional programs and procedures.
Shifting to more flexible funding structures can help agencies respond to global challenges and accelerate technological advances. This is particularly timely as we see new interest from companies and government agencies to co-fund industry-wide R&D challenges, as seen with the recent MFS-SPEED solicitation. This solicitation was sparked by a November 2022 UIDP workshop sponsored by the NSF Chemistry Directorate and supported by UIDP members Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, BASF, Dow, and IBM. You can read more about it in this 3-Minute Read. Contemporary approaches to research funding open the ecosystem to collaborative projects that combine the resources, expertise, and funding needed to bring maximum impact.
Why it matters
From the point of view of public science and technology leadership, research and innovation are critical to ensure future security, strength, and vitality. But innovation is needed not only in novel research, but also in the practices and mechanisms that enable it. Shaking up the frameworks used by public funders and making collaborative research simpler and more rewarding can enable broader participation and greater societal impact.
We want to hear from you. What do you think about the recommendations from the “Align, Act, Accelerate” report? Let us know on LinkedIn.