Well, I guess you can’t have too many science funding bodies…
An alert colleague pointed out a GETS call for applications for – Capability in Independent Research Organisations Funding. (GETS Reference: 41196)
This fund is aimed at non-Crown Research Institutes,
“which hold significant research capabilities supporting national outcomes in areas of government priority.”
This will appeal to organisations such as the Cawthron Institute, HERA (Heavy Engineering Research Association), Opus Research and other independent researchers. (You can see a full list here at IRANZ, the Independent Research Associations of NZ).
The major surprise is that this fund is to be administered by the Health Research Council (HRC).
In a way it all makes perfectly logical sense given the way that science, innovation and commercialisation ‘policy’ (used in the very loosest terminology) has gone over the past few years
We had science policy and funding being separated – a Ministry and a Foundation for R,S & T.
Then these two were brought together to have a Ministry of Science and Innovation.
That lasted about five minutes, and MBIE was set up, with much of its funding allocation removed when Callaghan Innovation came, and is coming into, being.
Oh, there’s also the Primary Research Growth Partnership administered by the Ministry of Primary Industry as another entity entirely.
And now this.
The HRC does make funding allocations to researchers in health – which presumably they have a fair degree of expertise to do so.
Now they’ve got to become experts in a wide range of research fields, completely unrelated to their core knowledge.
Instead of the fund being under MBIE, and aligned to its overarching goals which seeing as it helped write them it should understand, a completely different body gets to do the choosing.
I guess, when as a country, we have no clear idea of what we should be concentrating our limited scientific endeavours on, then spreading the resource ever more thinly and hoping something, anything, serendipitously happens to happen is as good as any other approach.
But it takes us ever further away from the exemplar countries such as Denmark and Singapore – countries that have a plan, stick to it for a bit, and then modify what they do to achieve the clear goals that they have.
Talk about re-arranging the deck chairs!