August 28, 2015

A new funding model: will Challenge-led research transform the way we do research?

Challenge-led funding for research has people talking, writes Professor Chris Gibson, Director of UOW's Global Challenges Program.  

Following the lead of the University College London in the UK and Princeton in the US, Australian universities in search of new funding sources outside the traditional government channels are creating their own challenge-led funding schemes. Melbourne and Wollongong were early leaders; Adelaide, UWS, Sydney and UNSW have recently signalled the creation of similar schemes.  As part of its vision for the next 10 years, Vice-Chancellor, Ian Jacobs recently stated that “UNSW wants to be known for improving the lives of people from disadvantaged and marginalised communities and to mobilise its expertise to lead debate, discussion and policy formulation on the grand challenges that face Australia and human kind". 

Challenge-led research involves funding bodies (such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) setting a global agenda, or a specified goal, and asking research teams or institutions to respond with project proposals. The listed challenges are not meant to be universal or comprehensive. Typically, they are framed around a high profile societal or environmental problem, and encourage researchers to collaborate with external organisations, industry and community groups towards practical outcomes. 

The language around challenge-led research was echoed again in the most recent revisions to Australia’s national strategic research priorities, led by the Chief Scientist Prof. Ian Chubb. These have been framed around a small number of key ‘Practical Research Challenges’, responding to the Federal Government’s agenda to improve the commercial and industry-relevant returns on research investment. 

In the Australian context especially, fiscal constraints have fuelled interest in challenge-led approaches as a way to focus efforts and resource allocation. Federal agencies, non-profit foundations and cash-strapped universities are all looking to new ways to maximise the return on resources when it has become obvious that the public research pool is not getting any bigger, and that they cannot fund all areas to desired levels. 

Will it work? 

UOW’s challenge-led funding scheme Global Challenges is in its third year, and from this experience are instructive insights for the broader national picture. 

The good news is that this type of funding can work, given the right institutional architecture.

Critical are stable institutions. Challenge-led funding should stem from a different, central pool than for recurrent funding of schools and research centres. Researchers are prepared to embrace challenge-led projects when underlying employment conditions, funding mechanisms and institutional structures are not threatened by short-term funding cycles and crises. Federally, the implication is that creating new opportunities for challenge-led funding ought not come at the expense of ‘blue sky’ research resources allocated through the Australian Research Council. 

Another key variable that underpins success is designing a program of funding that taps into researchers’ core motivations for pushing forward knowledge frontiers and engages them from the onset. Researchers should be encouraged and expected to deliver high quality scholarly outcomes, and to pursue new external grant funding opportunities – both key markers of success for researchers that already fuel motivation. 

The result is strikingly ambitious research that combines practical relevance, a social conscience, and a sharp scholarly edge. One of the challenges in UOW’s program is Manufacturing Innovation where engineers and materials scientists are supported to develop new products that improve society, but also combine efforts with other disciplines to ensure innovations are adopted. Researchers in materials science matched university challenge funding with a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant to develop the next generation condom (‘geldom’) that feels better to the user, and thus promises higher rates of use and accompanying reductions in sexually-transmitted disease in the developing world. Social marketers are exploring how to diffuse the new product as socially acceptable. Challenge-led funding can motivate a combination of talented people with a shared desire to make a difference. 

A third variable that underpins success is setting a high bar on interdisciplinary researcher mix, and an assessment process focused on face-to-face ‘pitches’, interviews and consultation, rather than paper-only applications minimising the risk of new funding rules being ‘gamed’. Successful Global Challenges projects must include researchers from at least three of the university’s five faculties, and those researchers must demonstrate in an interview context their shared passion or goals. Equally loved and hated, the ‘three faculty rule’, as it has become known, has encouraged researchers to have conversations with, and find, unlikely allies across vastly different research fields. It is a tough criterion to meet, but most who have made the effort enjoy the challenge. 

From our experience, it is clear that a special kind of ‘magic’ happens when truly novel combinations of researchers are brought together on such projects. One brought together an unlikely team of biochemical scientists, engineers and creative artists who discovered a shared fascination with paint – as a creative medium, a surface covering, and a fundamental problem of physics and radiation. 

To make the most from such radical combinations of researchers, challenge-led schemes need to take some risks – initially funding riskier projects and teams who have never collaborated together before. This is precisely the opposite logic to conventional funding schemes that only reward teams with proven collaborative experience.

And to quote Professor Ivison (acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at USYD, “What will differentiate the truly great universities in the future is the education they give their students while being able to draw on their research strengths to tackle long-term, complex problems that other organisations and governments either can’t or won’t”. 

Whether this pans out remains to be seen.  Our key insight is that the right kind of program design and institutional setting is needed to capitalise on the latent resource that is academic freedom. Challenge-led research schemes tread a fine line between demanding accountability for practical outcomes of research, and telling researchers in a top-down fashion what they should be doing research on. Too much top-down directive deadens curiosity, enthusiasm and passion, and risks producing uninspiring research outcomes. Stable institutions, secure funding for foundational research, and a solid understanding of what motivates researchers in the first place, are key prerequisites if Australian researchers are to truly respond to our societal challenges. 

Find out how UOW is transforming the way we do research through the Global Challenges program: Download the White Paper.  

UOW academics exercise academic freedom by providing expert commentary, opinion and analysis on a range of ongoing social issues and current affairs. This expert commentary reflects the views of those individual academics and does not necessarily reflect the views or policy positions of the University of Wollongong.