Sustaining Research Funding

Click - “ahhh.”

The joy of submitting a grant proposal. As your chair creaks when you lean back after submitting one, what is your next thought?

Is it deep satisfaction and mental relaxation?

More likely our thoughts skip immediately to the ignored research, that paper stuck in a draft cycle or our next grant proposal.

The Relentless Pursuit of Research Funding

Research funding demands relentless effort. You need to gain and maintain momentum.

But how can we be relentless on three different fronts, finding research funding, doing research and writing papers all at the same time?

Unresolvable dilemmas make us dream about other professions with clear and comprehensive solutions.

For example, engineering.

Consider how an engineer might solve the problem of applying force in three different systems simultaneously with one motor.

Engineers would use a flywheel.

Engineering a Solution to Academic Burnout

A flywheel is a heavy wheel or disc that stores rotational energy. Imagine a large, heavy disc mounted on an axle. Here's how it works:

1. Initial effort: It takes significant force to start spinning a flywheel due to its weight and inertia, similar to pushing a heavy object from rest.
2. Momentum build-up: As you apply force, the flywheel spins faster. The energy you input is stored as rotational energy.
3. Easier to maintain: Once the flywheel is spinning at high speed, it’s easier to keep it spinning. A small push now and then is enough to maintain its motion.
4. Energy storage: The spinning flywheel now contains a large amount of kinetic energy that can be tapped when needed.
5. Smoothing effect: In machines, flywheels help maintain constant speed despite fluctuations. They absorb excess energy when input increases and release it when it decreases.

A potter's wheel is a real-world example. The heavy wheel at the bottom is a flywheel. The potter kicks it to start spinning, and once it's moving, only occasional kicks are needed to maintain a steady speed for smooth work. Its also how that regenerative braking system in your hybrid creates electricity.

To achieve sustainable success as a researcher you a flywheel equivalent for finding research funding.

There is something can act as a flywheel, but its flywheel features are often ignored.

It’s a consortium project.

Flywheels: The Hidden Secret of Sustainable Research Funding

It is easy to think that the most important aspect of a consortium project is the research funding it brings in the short term.

Consortium projects also build research and innovation capacity, making them like flywheels that can help sustain research funding.

Let’s examine a well-known consortium project, the Human Genome Project.

It took a lot of initial effort. Despite the excitement, the Human Genome Project did not immediately guide genomic medicine into clinical medicine. 17 years later, we are only now seeing genomics-based medicine.

The Human Genome Project catalyzed extensive life sciences research and innovation. It led to new sequencing technologies and the creation of fields like genomics and personalized medicine. Now genomic sequencing is easier and cheaper. The project's data and tools have accelerated discoveries in areas like cancer research and evolutionary biology.

The availability of the human genome sequence expanded the research and innovation capacity of everyone in life sciences, healthcare, and other disciplines.

The Human Genome Project is a dramatic example of a consortium project acting like a research flywheel. Let’s look at a couple more.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and Unbiased Biomarkers for Personalized Diagnostics (U-BIOPRED)

The U-BIOPRED project was a landmark consortium initiative funded by IMI (now IHI). It brought together academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and patient organizations to develop a deep multi-omics dataset on severe asthma patients. This was the first consortium project I helped design and manage.

The U-BIOPRED dataset has transformed asthma research. It has been cited in over 1.300 publications and enabled new collaborations and projects. Companies and academic researchers have used it to discover or confirm targets, biomarkers, and pheno(endo)types. It is used to make decisions about target viability and therapeutic positioning.

By providing access to this dataset, U-BIOPRED increased the capacity for innovative asthma studies and new therapy development that would have been challenging without it.

The Structural Genomics Consortium is a public-private partnership that unites academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and charitable foundations to determine the three-dimensional structures of therapeutically relevant proteins. The SGC operates on an open science model, making all its research findings and reagents freely available to the global scientific community.

The SGC has solved the structures of over 1,700 human proteins by pooling resources and expertise, creating an unparalleled open-access repository. This has accelerated drug discovery research, as scientists worldwide can leverage these insights to develop new therapeutic candidates. The consortium model has built capacity and catalyzed innovation in structural biology.

These examples illustrate how consortium projects function like flywheels by increasing the research capacity of an entire field.

How do they contribute to the sustained success of individual researchers?

Consortium Projects: Your Research Funding Supercharger

There are many ways one can leverage consortium projects to cultivate research capacity.

Being part of a consortium makes you a leader in your field. This creates new opportunities and demonstrates to reviewers that you achieve beyond publications. You create impact.

Second, asset creators have the most knowledge about the assets they create. This is especially true when it comes to datasets. Even for well-described datasets, the creators have knowledge that those whose understanding of a dataset is limited to reading the description of the variables and the way the data was collected.

This is why I think the FAIR acronym is missing an “i” for interaction, specifically with the dataset creators. Even for the most findable, accessible, interoperable and usable datasets there will be knowledge about a given dataset that only those who helped create the dataset will have.

Being an active partner in a consortium that creates datasets gives us knowledge that can be used to form new collaborations that then lead to more funding.

Unlocking Collective Intelligence in Research

Another often overlooked asset we can forge with a consortium is collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the idea that a group can be smarter and more effective than the brightest individual working alone.

Imagine solving a complex puzzle. If you work alone, you might get stuck or miss clues. But with a diverse group working together, each person brings their unique perspective, knowledge, and skills. One might notice a pattern others missed, another might have a creative idea. By combining these insights, the team can solve the puzzle faster and more effectively than any individual. There's a substantial body of literature in high-impact journals on experiments demonstrating this effect (1,2).

In research and innovation, we can use collective intelligence similarly. When researchers from different backgrounds and specialties form a consortium, they can:

1. Share unique knowledge and expertise.

2. Challenge each other's assumptions and biases.

3. Generate new ideas through discussion.

4. Tackle complex problems from multiple angles.

5. Learn from each other's successes and failures.

It's like having a "super-brain" made of many individual minds working together.

We can use this “super-brain” to solve problems and make research more efficient. We can also use it to write better grant proposals more efficiently.

Mainstreaming Novel Ideas: The Consortium Advantage

Have you felt your novel ideas are being restricted by mainstream ideas? If the mainstream is against you, it will be difficult to get your papers and grants favorably reviewed, unless you conform. This can seem like a hopeless situation, but we often underestimate what’s possible.

Getting novel ideas into the mainstream starts with a group of people agreeing. What better place to build that group than in a consortium?

When we work together to solve problems, we are more receptive to the ideas of those we solved them with.

A consortium project can be the starting point for building the critical mass needed to push novel ideas into the mainstream. Consortium projects a great way to put moonshot thinking into practice.

Good to Great: The Steady Effort Approach

One of the biggest criticisms of consortium projects is their long duration. However, the meaningful change they aim for takes even longer. Investing in long-term impact can make the difference between being good and being great.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins and colleagues studied different companies to identify what made great ones. They found that they carried out a quiet, deliberate process to figure out and execute their plans. The companies they compared had a different approach:

“The comparison companies frequently launched new programs—often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at “motivating the troops.” Only to see them fail to produce sustained results. They sought the single defining action, the grand program, the one killer innovation, the miracle moment that would allow them to skip the arduous buildup stage and jump right to breakthrough. They would push the flywheel in one direction, then stop, change course, and throw it in a new direction. Then they would stop again, change course, and throw it into yet another direction. After years of lurching back and forth, the comparison companies failed to build sustained momentum and fell instead into what we came to call the doom loop.” (3)

Great companies have a flywheel mindset. Instead of seeking a wizard-enhanced bullet for a major breakthrough, they focus on growing capacity.

Building Your Academic Flywheel: The Key to Sustained Research Funding.

To be great at research and sustain funding over the long-term, we must invest effort in pushing a research equivalent of a mechanical flywheel.

Consortium projects require initial effort and time to gain momentum. However, once in motion, they generate valuable assets—such as patient cohorts, datasets, and laboratory models—that catalyze sustained research success. They aim to achieve something that individuals in small groups couldn’t. We have to maintain a passion to persist in doing crazy things.

Think of consortium projects are a way to increase research capacity. Adopting this new perspective changes our approach and what we recognize as opportunities.

In a consortium project, seize opportunities to increase research capacity.

Get involved in structuring or harmonizing a dataset. Work to harmonize different versions of the same experimental model in the consortium. Don’t hesitate to create a standard. Embrace and enable those efforts. Go beyond publications to raise awareness about the consortium’s assets.

If you’re not in a consortium, seek to join one or form your own to push your novel, ignored ideas into the mainstream by cultivating a group of like-minded individuals. Don’t wait for the perfect call for proposals.

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I spend my days developing and advising consortia in the life sciences and healthcare. Creating a consortium is easier than you might think. If you want to sustain your research success over the long term, set up a call and we will work through opportunities available to you to sustain research funding through a consortium project strategy.

Set up a call

References

1. Woolley, Anita Williams, et al. "Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups." science 330.6004 (2010): 686-688.
2. Riedl, Christoph, et al. "Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.21 (2021): e2005737118.
3. Collins, Jim. "Good to Great-(Why some companies make the leap and others don't)." (2009): 102-105.