TRADING OFF IMPACT FOR NOVELTY - FINDING THE BALANCE

A recent article in Nature by Melissa Flag outlines the tensions researchers face when launching their proposals into competitive funding environments where novelty is a key quality criterion rather than usefulness.

Melissa suggests that while researchers are proposing novel research, and reviewers are considering whether proposals are sufficiently novel, real problems facing society today remain unaddressed.

​For many scientists, making a difference through their science is a strong motivator. 

However, securing funds to embed evidence-based solutions is often a challenge. The potential pathway to outcomes and impacts is disrupted by the inevitable need to propose yet more novel research rather than progressing toward impact, in order to secure much needed funding via competitive processes. Novelty is often bundled with concepts of risk, pushing researchers into realms where current knowledge and accepted principles are applied in `unproved or speculative’ ways, new methods or ideas are proposed, and incremental or ground-breaking advances are made. 

The issue is, does rewarding considerable novelty and risk necessarily ensure the research will deliver usable and useful findings? How much of this type of research can New Zealand afford, compared with nations that deploy substantial funding pools to support basic, untargeted research?

Applied research that has a clear outcome in sight for a broad range of users within a realistic timeframe can deliver real change and benefits for Aotearoa New Zealand’s environment, society and economy. But it may not have a novel and highly risky launching pad. Instead, it might require more resources to support implementation, adoption and adaptation to make a difference. A challenge Melissa notes when she asks, `Who funds implementation?’

It can be particularly challenging to build the novelty and risk case for some types of science because they are perceived to reinforce or protect the status quo (for example, biosecurity and food safety) and, therefore, are perceived not to be inherently risky or novel. 

 if funders `truly cared about broader impact, it would be tracked, measured and used in reward systems’.

Yet there is still a potentially huge number of beneficiaries for this highly valuable research who may not have the scale, level of co-ordination or voice to directly resource or leverage funds to support this research … yet!

Melissa also suggests that if funders `truly cared about broader impact, it would be tracked, measured and used in reward systems’. She calls for science `quality’ metrics to be expanded to `recognize making real-world change’. And she suggests researchers, institutions and funders put more effort into partnering with others who can help take `shiny new ideas’ that otherwise would `never go beyond sparkle’ towards solutions.

Given the considerable need to deliver outcomes from science to safeguard our planet at this concerning time in our history, Melissa calls for funders to think again about the pressure they create for researchers to `simply go on to the next proposal – the next big, new idea, constantly chasing novelty, the bleeding edge of science’.

According to Melissa, this  is a waste. She calls for science policy analysts and funders to make generating practical solutions `enticing to researchers’ and not just something that might be regarded as `volunteer work – not part of a scientist’s job’.

It’s exactly this sort of science that communities pay their taxes to support. There’s no suggestion that curiosity-driven science doesn’t have its place, but it’s time to consider whether discoveries without impact are unnecessarily using up precious time and resources.