How Funding Selections Are Being Made: A Comparison of 12 European Innovation Agencies

Debates on the question which research should receive funding frequently center on policies and programmes, their rationales, goals and instruments. Yet when push comes to shove it is the research funding agencies deciding on which research projects will be realised and which will not. In order to make these decisions, research funding agencies have to evaluate project proposals so as to select the most promising proposals for funding. Since the funding of societally and economically relevant research is the most important task of research funding agencies, project selection is the very core of their business. Besides some research on peer reviewing there is little verified knowledge available on project evaluation and selection processes as well as the rationales behind these. In a recently finished study for the European Association of National Innovation Agencies Taftie a comparison of the procedures of 18 programmes of 12 European innovation agencies has been carried out. The key points of interest were selection and role of evaluators, selection criteria, ranking procedures and general process issues, including questions of legitimacy of funding decisions. A number of critical process issues were identified and ordered after three perspectives: a policy, an agency and a customer perspective. A major outcome of the study was the realisation that - contrary to the talk of politicians reflected e.g. in discourses around instruments such as the EU innovation scoreboard - there is a wide variety in selection procedures. Moreover, in lieu of the differences between the agencies, their regulatory, budgetary and governance environment and the functions they have to fulfil in the respective innovation systems, it does not make sense to define a "best practice" for the selection processes. The comparison of the ways in which the 12 innovation agencies evaluate and select projects shows that there is more than one solution to the challenge of financing the best research projects - "best" relating to fulfilling the programme goals. The socio-economic and political framework conditions the innovation agencies find themselves in, form their potential options for possible and sensible solutions in the respective innovation systems. This is true for older programmes, such as schemes focusing on the competitiveness of firms, but also newer programmes, such as schemes influenced by the societal problem-oriented Grand Challenge rationales.