People or Projects (PoP)? Investigating different research funding styles

The People or Projects proposal, PoP, aims to investigate different research funding styles and their impacts on researchers and research-output. It will focus on the familiar refrain “Fund People not Projects!”. This is the idea that funders should prioritise supporting selected researchers rather than supporting specific plans of work. However, the impacts of shifting the focus of funding on to investigators remains largely unexamined. There is not yet a robust body of evidence to draw on to support industrial R&D managers, research-funding agencies, or policy-makers more broadly. Radical breakthroughs, as well as incremental discoveries, are much sought-after by scientists, their funders and broader stakeholders. Despite this desire to support breakthrough science, there is growing concern that funding highly detailed projects may in fact favour incrementalism. Risk-taking may be constrained if investigators are tied to specific deliverables and defined lines of enquiry ex-ante, before having learned from further investigation, rapidly evolving science, and unexpected discoveries along the way. Funding scientists flexibly, without pre-specified deliverables and pre-defined lines of enquiry, could unleash their creativity and yield breakthroughs more readily. Conversely, a focus on people could preclude other ideas from less established scientists percolating up to the fore, the effect of which may be to similarly stifle creativity and innovation. Or it may preclude ideas that are closer to application, compared to more basic and fundamental science. Lastly, a focus on people could also preclude ideas that resonate with broader social priorities more strongly. The intuition of the former view explains why “people not projects” might generate more breakthroughs, but the concerns of the latter view should also caution us about the risks of loading on the people-based funding style too intensively. Our focus will be to see how moving from projects to people plays out on a number of these dimensions with systematic empirical measurement. Working with a major biomedical research funder, we seek to deploy a quasi-experimental approach to test these views. Our hope is to shed light on potential impacts and trade-offs, help practitioners assess the possible strengths and weaknesses of different funding strategies, and support them in striking the right balance. The main objective of the PoP proposal will be to deliver applied policy-focused research on issues of direct relevance to government, industry and charities. It will undertake a mix of methodological work on the nature of research-funding styles and their identification in datasets, alongside empirical work measuring their impacts and offering estimates on a range of policy-relevant indicators. The PoP proposal has three sequential aims. First, it will develop a framework for comparing research funding styles based on people and on projects by documenting key differences in their implementation. Second, it will gather data on researchers and their outputs for each of the funding styles to examine their impacts, both in the short-term and long-term. It will deploy qualitative (interview and document review) and quantitative methods (bibliometric and econometric techniques) to facilitate comparison across funding styles. Thirdly, it will seek to disseminate its findings through a publication, a policy brief, and a conference presentation.