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Abstract
Grant Managers contribute to the mission of research-intensive institutions by helping them to obtain competitive funding. However, their effectiveness in helping institutions and individuals secure funding is poorly studied. In this study, we provide an assessment of the contribution of Grant Managers in attracting competitive funding for research. We compare success rates of funding applications having benefited from specialised input into the grant proposal's content prior to submission (advanced support) with those having received less support. We collected information from two Grant Offices of Portuguese biomedical research institutions from 2008 to 2011 and focused on the European Commission Marie Curie grants. The results show improved success rates for funding applications which have received advanced support, suggesting that Grant Managers providing specialised support are essential for supporting the research activity. This study fosters the debate on Grant Management assessment and may contribute to a wider recognition of the profession.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Joana Costa (IMM) and Mariana Guerreiro (IGC) as team members of the Grant Offices in this study. We would also like to thank Lounes Chikhi, Jules Contreras and Teresa Costa for useful discussion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under the Ciência 2007 Programme for M. Trindade and S. Vidal.
Additional information
Sheila Vidal has a PhD in Innate Immunity from the University Paris XI, France and is currently the Head of the Research Funding Affairs Unit at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal. She has ten years of experience in pre-award Grant Management. She also developed in-house grant application training and coordinates/lectures advance training modules at Masters and PhD programmes in Lisbon, Brazil and Africa.
Raul Laureano has a PhD in Quantitative Methods for Management and is a researcher at the Business Research Unit at the ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, in Portugal. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Business School of the ISCTE-IUL, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate classes of Statistics and Data Analysis. He is co-author of books about Financial Mathematics and Statistics with SPSS and of more than forty publications in international conferences and journals.
Margarida Trindade has a PhD in Development Biology from University College London, UK. She dedicated her career to Research Management, first as a Pre-award Funding Coordinator at Instituto de Medicina Molecular and currently at the Business Research Unit, ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, in Portugal. She also developed training on grant application and career development for Masters' and PhD programmes and has acted as an expert evaluator and advisor for the European Commission.