Alternative Sources of Funding

It is no secret that in order to run a successful research program, many scientists need to secure their own funding. Unfortunately, working with a limited number of available government and private grants, it takes more than a good idea to get funded. Proposals need to also be cutting edge without being too risky, and preferably from a lab with a demonstrated history of success. But this discourages projects that could be truly revolutionary from being proposed and places young investigators, forced to compete against more established labs, at a disadvantage.

Turns out, there are alternative sources of funding emerging that may help counter these issues. For example, InnoCentive and the more widely-known X PRIZE Foundation, post challenges and award prizes for inventions and solutions that tend to favor the risky projects that they believe drive innovation but might not otherwise get funded by traditional sources (additional sites promoting scientific contests can be found here). These competitions are geared towards research that has immediate applications and cover a broad range of sciences. Prizes range anywhere from $10,000 for devising a method of converting a di-olefin to a mono-alcohol (listed at InnoCentive) up to $10M for sequencing 100 genomes in 10 days (Archon X PRIZE).

Some non-profits are adopting the approach of directly involving the general public to finance research and in the case of the Eureka Fund, aim to promote early-career scientists (see the recent New York Times article “Seeking to Help Budding Researchers With a Click of the Mouse”). The Eureka Fund is currently focused on energy and environmental research and is limited to researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, however there are other public fundraising groups sprouting up so it is worth keeping an eye out for these unique opportunities.