Issues in Research

Intellectual-Risk Management
If there were a single concept on which every grant sponsor could agree, it would be the importance of funding novel ideas. Novelty is at the heart of all creative activity, whether artistic expression, scholarship, or research. Sponsors value novelty dearly because novelty holds the promise of discovery.

As much as sponsors value novelty, they also fear it. The unknown threatens our established ways of believing and doing. The unknown does not respect authority, and venturing into the unknown carries a high risk of failure.

For these reasons grant writers may find themselves in conflict. Presenting clever ideas that deviate from conventional wisdom in a grant proposal will both fascinate and frighten reviewers. A colleague once told me that the ideal reaction of a reviewer to a grant writer’s ideas is the exclamation “I wish I’d thought of that!” That is the fascination. Unfortunately, many reviewers confronted with novelty seem more likely to say, “It will never work.” That is the fear.

Grant writers must deal with this conflict head-on if they are going to be successful. They have to find ways of convincingly presenting novelty to readers while simultaneously reducing the risk of failure and minimizing threat to existing positions. It’s a tall order—something I call intellectual-risk management.

Intellectual-risk management is not magic. It’s persuading readers that your novel ideas make sense and will work. In grant proposals, it’s primarily accomplished through a limited review of literature in the field and—in empirical disciplines—by the inclusion of carefully selected pilot data.

The literature review in a grant proposal is an opportunity to demonstrate how your ideas fit into what has already been done. By showing how your ideas are derived from earlier work, you decrease threat to the established order and give reviewers confidence your project will work. When you hook your ideas onto accepted theories, you define your ideas as evolutionary, not revolutionary. You want to make readers pay attention to the novelty of your ideas, while you calm their fears by placing your ideas into a less threatening context.

Pilot data work in much the same way. Good pilot data represent proof of concept. Pilot data also shows your ability to exert methodological control. Pilot data should reduce reviewer skepticism and balance the inherent risks associated with novelty.

Neither literature review nor pilot data will work to reduce risk in the eyes of reviewers if your ideas are revolutionary or your methods are untested. And they will not work if your theoretical perspective is a direct attack on the existing intellectual order of your discipline.

I once asked a grants officer at the National Science Foundation how many grant proposals she had seen in her 20 years of experience that were truly “out-of-the-box” with the potential to shift the paradigm of a discipline. Her answer was no more than one or two.

Instead, most grant writers hone their skills at intellectual-risk management. They present ideas that are as novel as they dare and walk a fine line between expressing too much novelty to be acceptable and too little novelty to attract the attention of reviewers. In the middle lies the road to success in grantsmanship.

Robert P. Lowman
Associate Vice Provost for Research

Between Issues

Funding for Behavioral and Social Science Research
The GrantSource Library has added a new resource, FundSource, to its Funding Opportunities web page http://www.research.unc.edu/grantsource/fundopps.html. This free search tool, created with support from the National Science Foundation and the American Psychological Association, is designed to help behavioral and social scientists find research funding. The FundSource database includes short descriptions, contact information, and web links to programs from federal agencies, private foundations, and international organizations that fund behavioral and social science research. There are three options for searching. Searchers can do a "List Search" for agencies included in the database and then examine the records for contact information and a brief description. Using "Database Search", specific data (e.g., organization name, discipline, free-text terms) can be specified. Finally, "Web Search" performs a full-text search of the records in the FundSource database and returns links to the web pages of those organizations. When using any of the free-text search options, it's best to use few search terms and rather broad ones. While the Community of Science funding database is much larger and offers a more sophisticated search engine, FundSource offers some unique features for researchers in the behavioral and social sciences.