MIT study: Scientific innovation is more likely with
long-term, less-restrictive funding
The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets.
“If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study. “The researcher has to believe that short-term failure will not be punished.”
The results are contained in a working paper released this fall, “Incentives and Creativity: Evidence from the Academic Life Sciences,” by Azoulay, Gustavo Manso, an assistant professor at Sloan, and Joshua Graff Zivin, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego.
The researchers believe their evidence shows it is possible for research institutions to help scientists produce breakthrough findings. “You can generate innovation, but the details matter,” says Azoulay. “What you want to provide incentives for is future performance, not performance today.”
With the 2009 stimulus bill increasing science funding for the moment, Azoulay says he and his colleagues would like to instigate a discussion about not only how much is spent on scientific research, but how the money is used.
Azoulay, Manso, and Graff Zivin arrived at their conclusions after comparing two types of funding: support from the investigator program of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Maryland, and the R01 grants of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Maryland. The HHMI funding lasts five years, ask researchers to “take risks” despite “the chance of failure,” and provide a two-year buffer of funding if terminated. The NIH grants last three to five years, have more specific aims, and cease immediately if not renewed.
The researchers identified 73 life scientists given HHMI support in the mid-1990s and tracked their work through 2006. The study compared them to two groups of similarly accomplished scientists receiving NIH grants: one group of 393 scientists who had received early-career prizes, and another group of 92 scientists receiving the NIH’s MERIT funding, for exceptional projects.
Azoulay, Manso, and Graff Zivin found that compared to the early-career prize winners with NIH grants, the HHMI-funded scientists produced twice as many papers in the top 5 percent of the most cited articles in their fields, and three times as many in the top 1 percent. Compared to the NIH-funded scientists with MERIT grants, the HHMI group produced about the same quantity of papers in the top 5 percent by citation, but 50 percent more papers in the top 1 percent.
As a measure of “creativity,” the researchers also found that the HHMI investigators had about 10 percent more variety in the keywords they used to describe their own published work than the early-career prizewinners from the NIH. “There are as many definitions of creativity as there are people studying creativity,” acknowledges Azoulay. “But ultimately creativity is measured in especially good outcomes.”
Azoulay, Manso, and Graff Zivin emphasize that their work is not an institutional critique of the NIH. “The conclusion of our paper is not that the NIH should transform itself into a version of the HHMI,” Azoulay adds. Their larger concern is to help policy-makers see the effects of different types of funding. “It’s an outstanding question what the actual mix of exploration and exploitation we need is,” Azoulay adds.
In recent years, the NIH has also developed multiple types of funding beyond the traditional R01 grants, including The Pioneer Award; The New Innovator Award; and the Transformative Research Projects Awards, which are intended to back “bold and creative investigator–initiated research.” All of these grants last five years.
The research was funded in part by the Kauffman Foundation, and the Science of Science Policy Program of the National Science Foundation.
Written by: Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office