BU Research Blog

Writing for the Alternative Democracy Research website Jan Blommaert offers a very interesting and controversial perspective on bid writing. His claim is that it is large a waste of time and public money. His case relates to his participation in a Horizon 2020 bid consortium, the production of the bid he estimates having taken hundreds of man hours, but the stream could only fund two projects. The fact that 147 were submitted meant that independent of quality 145 of which could be deemed excellent but could not be funded.

One might consider this argument as sour grapes on the part of a member of a team whose project was deemed excellent but could not be funded. But there is a serious point here. If the hours taken up by bid writing were re-channelled, would more valuable research be done. In other words if the 100+ hours of manpower devoted to writing bids were monetized would this be seen as an ineffective way to expend resources and instead the funds were used to support actual data gathering. It is an interesting thought. Much research entered into the REF in the UK is deemed excellent, what percentage of that is funded research is unknown. If research does not have to be funded to be excellent, and if bid writing detracts from research in order to meet arbitrary targets is this a misallocation of valuable resources. This argument may be particular prescient for social science where funding is less available yet no less important.

The thought here is whether academics explore ways to minimize costs of research that still answer important research questions rather than constantly seeking funding. It is a thought.