Opinion:
In our world, we talk a lot about just how long/much it takes to commercialize university innovation once disclosed, but what about the massive amount of dedication, passion, and resource planning required by the innovators upstream to move from idea to a research trajectory.
Like entrepreneurs or corporate strategists, faculty must assess current needs, future opportunities, and available funding, then commit to a research direction that may span decades. When circumstances force a change in this calculation, it can require a major pivot, potentially derailing years of effort and vision.
A recent NIH-linked article in Nature highlights the real-world impact of such forced changes: hundreds of NIH grants, including many supporting cutting-edge and career-defining research, have been terminated midstream due to shifting priorities. These abrupt disruptions not only halt promising innovation, but also risk stalling the development of new methodologies and the training of future scientists. The lost momentum and diminished returns underscore how supporting the original vision-rather than forcing pivots-can be crucial for long-term innovation outcomes
Excerpt from Nature article,
In its bid to reduce government spending and rein in ‘woke’ science, the administration of US President Donald Trump has, over the past three months, terminated about 800 active research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Now, a study published late last month in the journal Scientometrics1 highlights the long-term benefits of renewing existing grants, finding that US scientists who received renewals from the NIH over the past four decades produced more novel research than did those who didn’t.
Although the study focused on a major US biomedical-science funding agency, the results might persuade governments worldwide “to implement policies that give stable funding to researchers”, says study co-author Aruhan Bai, a science-policy researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institutes of Science and Development (CASISD) in Beijing. Continuous funding, Bai says, will ultimately “encourage the real prosperity of science”.
Full story: Renewal of NIH grants linked to more innovative results, study finds
