Grant: How does re­search fund­ing af­fect re­search­ers’ will­ing­ness to take risks?

Researchers are expected to explore new ideas, question established thinking and pursue research that can expand what we know. But the more unconventional a research idea is, the greater the risk that it will not produce the results the researcher hopes for. For individual researchers, taking that risk can be difficult when they also need to publish, secure new grants and build their careers.

So how do we create a research system that allows researchers to take chances? This is the question that Professor Hans Christian Kongsted from the Department of Strategy and Innovation at CBS and his research team will now try to answer.

He has just received DKK 4,999,998 from the Villum Foundation for the project The Villum Experiment: Risk, Novelty, and Scientific Trajectories, which will investigate the relationship between research funding, risk-taking and scientific novelty.

“One of the big questions within the field of ‘science of science’ is how we design research funding in a way that best encourages researchers to think outside the box and pursue more unorthodox ideas – in other words, ‘high-risk, high-gain’ projects,” says Hans Christian Kongsted.

An experiment in research funding

The project builds on the Villum Foundation’s own Villum Experiment Programme. The programme aims to create space for unconventional research ideas with the potential to lead to scientific breakthroughs.

Unlike many other research funding programmes, Villum Experiment focuses solely on the proposed research project rather than the applicant’s background and academic standing, as applications are assessed anonymously.

This design makes the programme particularly interesting to Hans Christian Kongsted and his research team.

“The main objective of Villum Experiment is to promote ‘high-risk, high-gain’ projects. At the same time, the programme has been running for a number of years under broadly similar conditions. This gives us a valuable opportunity to analyse large amounts of comparable data and examine how the risk profiles of the proposed projects have developed over time,” he says.

Together with his research team, he will investigate whether the programme encourages researchers to propose riskier projects, whether it succeeds in selecting novel ideas and what scientific outcomes the funded projects produce.

But first, they will have to answer a difficult question: How do you assess how novel and risky a research idea is before you know whether it will succeed?

To do this, the researchers will analyse application texts using bibliometric methods and administrative data. Citation-based methods and computational text analysis will help them examine, whether, for example, projects combine existing knowledge in unusual ways, venture into new areas of research or introduce new topics.

Because the Villum Experiment has been running for a number of years, the researchers can also track what happened after the projects received funding. They will look at scientific publications and patents as well as longer-term effects, such as citations and the extent to which the projects influence subsequent research.

Who is willing to take a chance?

The researchers are interested in more than which ideas are the riskiest. They also want to know who is willing to propose them.

“A particular focus of our project is to examine which types of applicants – for example, early-career versus established researchers – are actually willing to propose riskier projects, given the career risks that this may involve,” explains Hans Christian Kongsted.

A researcher’s ability to pursue a project with an uncertain outcome may depend on where they are in their career. The researchers will therefore investigate whether some groups are more likely than others to seek funding for riskier projects.

This could provide a more nuanced picture of how research funding influences the ideas that researchers choose to pursue.

“Different groups of researchers may be in different positions to take the risks involved in pursuing a potentially groundbreaking research project,” says Hans Christian Kongsted.

The results will shed light on the extent to which Villum Experiment manages to select high-risk projects and encouraging risk-taking among researchers applying to the programme.

The project goes beyond evaluating the Villum Experiment. The researchers hope the findings will provide new insights into how funding decisions shape the projects researchers choose to propose.

“Ultimately, this can contribute to a broader discussion about how research systems should be designed, both in Denmark and internationally, if we want to make room for ideas that carry a greater risk of failure but also offer potentially greater benefits to society,” explains Hans Christian Kongsted.