The Perceived State of Research Funding in Europe and Potential Improvements to Increase Innovation & Productivity

Abstract: Currently most public research is funded by project-based grant schemes and applying for these is an essential part of most researchers’ jobs. Researchers are therefore in a rather unique situation that many other professions do not experience, needing to seek out funding by themselves. The need to seek out funding creates certain problems and through the years many complaints have been levied against the system, such as the time consuming nature of the applications and the very low success rate for the schemes. Even though there have been many unofficial complaints, there has been little documentation of what scientists perceive as problematic with the system. This study’s goal was to ascertain more clearly what exactly researchers thought was problematic about the current system, as well as to elucidate potential improvements. Through neutrally positioned semi-structured interviews with researchers from all over Europe data was gathered and put through a social science interview coding process. The results revealed that researchers were very negatively posed towards the funding system in general, with four times as many negative statements as positive ones, even after being prompted for positive ones. Some of the largest issues were seen as the unstable nature of the review process, the low success rates across the board and the time consuming nature of applications. The largest wished improvement was a change in the grant money distribution towards smaller and more accessible grants that were available to a greater number of scientists. Other improvements frequently mentioned included a stronger base salary, more flexible deadlines, greater support in seeking out and applying for grants, simpler application processes and a system change to a lottery model. This study found that there is not one clear solution to the problems that researchers are having with the funding system. The problems are diverse and so must the solutions be in order to ameliorate the situation. Further research should investigate the feasibility of implementing a more comprehensive system fix in order to enable researchers to be innovative.