Experimental Approaches to Improving Research Funding Programs Proceedings of a Workshop (2024) / Chapter Skim
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1 Keynote Presentations
1 Keynote Presentations
Pages 7-18
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From page 7... ...
EXPERIMENTS IN PEER REVIEW AND FUNDING Shirley Tilghman introduced her thoughts on experimentation in science funding by reviewing the findings of the Expert Panel on International Practices for Funding Natural Sciences and Engineering Research. Conducted for the Council of Canadian Academies, the charge to the panel, which Tilghman chaired, was to look internationally at successful practices for funding natural sciences and engineering research and at how such practices could be applied to funding for this research in Canada.
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From page 8... ...
Proposals for each of the three career stages are reviewed independently by review panels, and specific budgets are set aside for each grant type. "These were very specific efforts on the part of these two agencies to ensure that there is workforce pipeline flow through the system," Tilghman said.
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From page 9... ...
"What is the best strategy for funding science," Tilghman asked, "funding those who are most likely, based on prior productivity, to produce the most important science, or funding as equitably as possible? " Tilghman discussed several interesting experiments in peer review being explored by various countries to counter the increasing competition, low success rates, administrative burdens, and bias associated with peer reviewing, along with the difficulties caused by investigators applying for multiple grants and the problems that arise when reviewing multidisciplinary grants.
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From page 10... ...
Some organizations have used partial lotteries after the screening of preproposals, including the Health Research Council of New Zealand to support high-risk highreward science and the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany to support "bold new ideas." Not all countries and institutions are focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tilghman stated, but a number are. For example, some, such as the
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From page 11... ...
The United Kingdom has been particularly active in creating equality charters, which are voluntary efforts on the part of institutes to be reviewed for their policies around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Canada and New Zealand, in particular, have targeted research programs with special review panels for Indigenous populations, and many countries are including progress in diversity, equity, and inclusion among grant review criteria.
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From page 12... ...
Gallant continued, "Today, I want to add a few more anecdotes of success to the narrative and speak to the evidence showing how tiered evidence and experimentation-driven innovation funding from the public sector can drive results." Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) at USAID is a tiered, evidencebased, open-innovation fund that offers flexible grants to test new ideas, build evidence of what works, and scale breakthrough solutions that address some of the world's toughest development challenges.
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From page 13... ...
To do that, DIV employs a tiered funding model in which small amounts of funding are provided for pilots of a broad range of promising ideas. Before large-scale funding is provided, innovations undergo rigorous testing of impact and cost-effectiveness, often, though not always, using randomized controlled trials (RCTs)
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From page 14... ...
Gallant related that, in 2019, DIV funded researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to work with the government of Indonesia to conduct an RCT to evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of transitioning one of the world's largest social benefit programs from physical rice distribution to direct purchase through an electronic debit card. According to this experiment, millions in the program started receiving the total amount of food intended for them 81 percent of the time, up from 24 percent of the time prior to shifting to digital implementation.
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From page 15... ...
It showed that for a portfolio investment of $16 million, innovations supported by DIV generated an estimated $261 million in discounted social benefits, a cost-benefit ratio of 17 to 1. Gallant noted, "This analysis showed that open, tiered, evidence-based innovation funding with a rules-based, peer-review-driven decision process has the potential to deliver exceptionally high social returns." Regarding which innovations scale, a common view is that pilots rarely scale and that later-stage innovations have a much higher scaling rate.
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From page 16... ...
Obstacles include constrained and hypertargeted funding, limited funding mechanisms, insufficient time, limited manpower, and a broad mix of incentives that make it hard to integrate what works into standard practice. DIV recently received a $45 million award from Open Philanthropy to help it build the infrastructure needed to connect innovation and experimentation to large-scale operational programming.
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From page 17... ...
It also seeks to match researchers with other academics and researchers. "We get a lot of proposals from innovators who are putting forward a really interesting and compelling solution but might not have the technical skills to rigorously test it," Gallant explained.
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