ABSTRACT
Scientic research is the bedrock in which new technologies incubate, and government and private funding is what fuels scientic research around the globe. The United States, Japan, and a few other countries that understand this key relationship have been investing tens of billions of dollars in scientic research annually to maintain their leadership in science and technology. The research and development expenditures of all countries combined exceeded $1 trillion dollars in 2007 with an upward trend.* With about 5.7 million researchers around the globe,† this corresponds to about $175,000 of funding per researcher per year. In 2008, U.S. universities spent $51 billion in research expenditures,‡ and with nearly 275,000 researchers in U.S. universities,§ this amounts to about $185,000 of funding per researcher per year. These numbers look impressive, but only a small fraction of all proposals submitted to funding agencies is supported. Although it can be said that competition serves as a lter for quality, it is also conceivable that, with the declination of overwhelming numbers of proposals, some potentially very creative ideas are lost forever. This brings up the question if funding agencies can be more resourceful and clever to increase their chances of investing on the right set of proposals. To this end, the aim in this chapter is to (a) describe how a model funding agency should be organized and function, (b) discuss how researchers can build a dynamic interaction with funding agencies to get their ideas across better, and (c) suggest proposal assessment and selection ideas that can be used to make the proposal funding process more effective with limited resources.
