Swifter approval of grant applications will be vital for ensuring European research projects in cutting-edge technologies can keep pace with American and Chinese rivals, a director of Germany’s innovation agency has argued ahead of its largest-ever funding round.
Established in 2019 to back “high-risk, high-reward” research projects and based on America’s famed Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa), the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (Sprind) has sought to operate differently to traditional research funding agencies in Europe, including speeding up its peer review, its head of challenges, Jano Costard, told Times Higher Education.
While the typical timeline from grant application to receiving money in Germany is six months, the agency aims to review bids within 14 days, explained Costard.
“As technological progress accelerates, funding timeframes also need to be shorter,” he said. “If our teams are really slow in giving out funding, researchers are going to look elsewhere, such as US venture capital funds who don’t wait months to award money,” said Costard on what he called the “funding bottleneck” that has hampered the approval of potentially transformative projects in fast-moving research fields.
