Research Funding: Persistent challenges & lessons learned from a recent portfolio evaluation

I had the pleasure to collaborate with SIRIS Academy as they evaluated Caixa Foundation’s Health Research Portfolio. I was hired as an independent expert consultant to SIRIS and enjoyed the collaboration. But I was also reminded of the challenges all funders have when running highly competitive calls as the process tends to favour:

• More experienced and established researchers over early and mid-career researchers
• Well-established, and often privileged, research and academic organisations
• Competition over collaboration between academic and research organisations.

The following strategic questions emerge against this background:

• Should funders take an interest in supporting earlier career stages? This most likely involves designing calls with different criteria suited to early and mid-career researchers, where potential for excellence is key to identify and nurture. More advanced funding calls aim to tackle historical disadvantages based on protected characteristics like gender, ethnicity and race.
• How can funders help build research capacity? There are a lot of good research centres that work more closely with local communities and can offer value to the sector. Yet they often lack the dedicated funding capacity more privileged organisations have to participate in highly competitive funding calls.
• How can funders nurture genuine collaborations that can increase the potential for impact? The competitive nature of funding calls and how organisations are assessed inhibits genuine collaboration across academic and research organisations. Yet there is plenty of evidence that more diverse teams, particularly those with a mix of disciplines, have more potential for transformative change and impact. Dedicated resources to help translate knowledge, break silos and enable effective collaborations are needed.

Finally, a persistent challenge for foundations is to clarify their role in the pathway to impact beyond funding. Often, they can shorten the time to impact by flexing their policy and advocacy muscles and by getting better at funding across themes that build on each other (e.g. technology development for a variety of diseases). This requires good data and incentives for staff that are linked to clear strategic objectives.