Iceberg alert for NIH

Does NIH select the right healthcare ventures through the SBIR grant program?

One way governments aim to spur entrepreneurship is through providing startup capital to qualified ventures. In the United States, the government does so through federal grant programs like the SBIR/STTR program. Despite the government’s efforts to spur entrepreneurship through capital distribution, we don’t know much about the selection capabilities that government agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have in place to choose qualified ventures for funding. Through exploiting a quasi-natural experiment enabled by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009, we seek to determine whether the NIH selects ventures with the most innovation and commercialization potential. Overall, our findings suggest that the NIH effectively identifies and prioritizes ventures with superior observable innovation capabilities. Yet, they could do more to discern the underlying tacit value of the innovation to prioritize selecting high-risk ventures that have the potential to create impactful innovation in the future. Our analyses should help policymakers orient their thinking around selection capabilities when assessing the impact of government programs with the broader objective of supporting novel healthcare innovation.

A new paradigm for the scientific enterprise: nurturing the ecosystem

The institutions of science are in a state of flux. Declining public funding for basic science, the increasingly corporatized administration of universities, increasing "adjunctification" of the professoriate and poor academic career prospects for postdoctoral scientists indicate a significant mismatch between the reality of the market economy and expectations in higher education for science. Solutions to these issues typically revolve around the idea of fixing the career "pipeline", which is envisioned as being a pathway from higher-education training to a coveted permanent position, and then up a career ladder until retirement. In this paper, we propose and describe the term "ecosystem" as a more appropriate way to conceptualize today's scientific training and the professional landscape of the scientific enterprise. First, we highlight the issues around the concept of "fixing the pipeline". Then, we articulate our ecosystem metaphor by describing a series of concrete design patterns that draw on peer-to-peer, decentralized, cooperative, and commons-based approaches for creating a new dynamic scientific enterprise.

Junior Investigators Thinking About Quitting Research: A Survey

OBJECTIVE. Junior tenure-track faculty report high levels of stress and low satisfaction; the increasingly competitive funding environment compounds this discontent. We examined factors associated with junior investigators who were thinking about quitting research.

METHOD. Data were collected as part of a program evaluation of an interdisciplinary research mentoring program in an academic medical center.

RESULTS. Of the 62 mentees, 44 responded to the survey (71%). When asked “In the past year, have you considered quitting research?” 39 mentees answered the question; 17 (44%) answered in the affirmative. Those who had considered quitting had lower scores on the Clinical Research Appraisal Inventory–12 (CRAI–12) and job satisfaction and higher scores on burnout. In a regression model, we found that only CRAI–12 scores were significantly, inversely associated with thinking about quitting.

CONCLUSION. Factors associated with thinking about quitting included lower confidence in research skills, reduced job satisfaction, and higher levels of burnout.

Funding sources in faculty development: strategies for success in submitting proposals

Although the capacity for integrated research and potential for translating research findings to the clinical setting have never been stronger, we are paradoxically entering a period of highly constrained funding. It is more important than ever for clinician scientists and young researchers to be strategic in the approach to funding. The purpose of this article is to discuss strategies for a successful approach to appropriate grant funding agencies.