And the Grantee Is ... Not Me!

SPONSORED RESEARCH

by James Dearing

Michigan State University

Sourse: ICA News January 2001

Why do we lose in research grants competitions? In my last column for this newsletter, I recounted the real-time personal process of considering an unsolicited Request for Proposals (RFP) for which I knew my odds of winning were very good (perhaps a 20-30% likelihood). Subsequently, together with a savvy team, I crafted a proposal and sent it off. We were unusually proud of the proposal for it was nothing if not novel; we'd taken the grantee's rather dull (to us) stated objectives and turned much of the work on its head, proposing a radically different way for the grantee to think not only about the big initiative they wanted studied, but also, we hinted, about their programming in general. So what happened? Naturally, we lost.

Now, I'm no stranger to losing out in grants competitions. Anyone who's rather successful in receiving external awards to conduct research fails a lot. It may appear that they receive grants all the time, but the fact is that successful grant getters pair good ideas with a prolific number of funding proposals, so that something's always happening for them and their department. They learn -- perhaps through sheer quantity and attention diversion -- to externalize the failure so that rejection is less a reflection on the quality of their proposal than it is a reflection of not proposing just what the sponsor wants at that particular time. And this isn't merely ego protection; sponsors do have preferences, public and private, in their competitions.

So my team of collaborators and I did exactly that. We found numerous plausible reasons having to do with the sponsor for being turned down. We commiserated about the project officers, about the sponsor's biases, and wondered aloud why we had wanted to work with them anyway. We talked about how it was unrealistic to really expect an organization to respond positively to such a radical, innovative idea.

Then again, a loss is a loss.

This thoughtful proposal -- mostly mine -- failed for a very simple, good reason: We didn't propose to do what the sponsor wanted to have done. And while you can hope that a sponsor will see the light of day and realize how great your idea is, being successful with proposals for sponsored research most often means that you have met and perhaps exceeded the expectations of the sponsor's program officers. Program officers, including the members of proposal review committees, are smart people. As holders of the purse strings, they will be quite certain that they have correctly identified the most compelling questions and research foci that we, in turn, should address. My proposal, in being quite different from what the sponsor's program officers had asked for in their RFP, sent them the message that we didn't agree with their definition of the problem. Such a proposal, while a kick to brainstorm and write, signals itself as an outlier to reviewers, one that offers up ready reasons for being passed over. Review committees will sometimes take a chance on a proposal that the members identify as an outlier as long as they are making a number of awards. But in a winner-take-all competition like we were entering, proposing an outlier is the kiss of death. You can't expect program officers to reorient their thinking just because you propose that they should. That's as true at the National Institutes of Health as it is at the San Diego Department of Corrections.

Now, we weren't complete dummies in conceptualizing our losing proposal. As we scribbled our proposal strategy on whiteboards, we talked aloud about why our approach was the only one we'd want to use for the proposed research and that if the sponsor saw it differently, so be it. We knowingly dug our own grave. But after several years of conducting sponsored research and evaluations, this is one of the important lessons I've learned: To advance your career, it's very important to control the research agenda in sponsored work- For short-term contracts or grants that come easily, you can afford to divert (or stall) your career trajectory by working outside the theories or paradigms that interest you intellectually and to which you contribute as a scholar. For longer-term projects, such decisions are risky unless you want to change the focus of your career. We gambled, not with money, but with time, that we could persuade the project officers in question that our vision was more compelling than theirs.

Of course, not all was lost from the experience. It is often so with failed proposals for sponsored research. We've become hardened in our belief in the worth of our untested idea. We've redrafted the proposal into a draft white paper, met again as a team, and formally met with another sponsor about our idea in the hope of refining our ideas. We've presented our ideas at a national conference as another beta test. Now we'll rewrite our ideas again, either as the basis for another proposal, the founding of a modest center, or the basis of a journal article, and we may present our ideas more fully to the staff of a research center. So, the failed proposal lives on and may perhaps lead to an eventual test of our ideas in practice.

Some weeks after learning about the sponsor's rejection of our proposal, I received word that another proposal I helped write had been funded and that a third proposal I wrote had been approved and was expected to be funded. A few days afterward, I learned that a fourth research proposal had been rejected by a federal agency for a technical reason. We resubmitted it but will have to wait some time before it goes through scientific review. By having more than one propoal in the works, you soften the blow of rejection and allow yourself to care less about any one proposal than you would if it were the only sponsored research proposal you were developing, submitting, and waiting to hear about. Proposing multiple projects also enables you to stand your paradigmatic gound on the lengthier proposed projects and gamble that sponsors might just see the world your way.