How Novelty and Feasibility Inform Research Funding Decisions

Novel work entails known risks. When they published new ideas, their work has a greater likelihood of being a “hit,” but also a “flop.” The same is also true of new ideas proposed to funding agencies. To counteract these tendencies, agencies like the German Research Foundation have developed programs to expressly support innovative, risky research. The investigation of the authorrs, presented in this ZEW PRICE Seminar, of one such program, the Reinhart Koselleck Projects programme, makes two contributions to existing scholarship on novelty and risk in science. First, the authors go beyond the track record of the applicant and examine the novelty of the proposed project as well. Second, they integrate the idea of feasibility into their conceptual model. The authors develop a measure of project feasibility and assess how it might moderate the effect of novelty on the likelihood of funding. Their analysis of all proposals submitted to this programme since 2008 reveals no significant penalties against novel proposals, or against applicants with a track record of novel research, although a significant interaction effect reveals that novel proposals submitted by applicants with a history of producing novel research are less likely to be funded. As expected, feasible projects are more likely to win funding. Furthermore, feasibility mitigates the perception penalty against novel applicants. That is, only when feasibility is low, applicants with a higher share of novel publications are less likely to get funding. As the first empirical study to measure and incorporate feasibility, the authors discuss how it, and its interaction with project novelty, informs funding decisions, and share implications for research evaluation more broadly.