IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rseval/v8y1999i3p201-204.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Evaluating high risk research: an assessment of the Wellcome Trust's Sir Henry Wellcome Commemorative Awards for Innovative Research

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Grant
  • Liz Allen

Abstract

In 1996, the Wellcome Trust set up an annual competition to fund high-risk, non-obvious research in the biomedical sciences, called Showcase awards. The evaluation at the end of the first year involved an experiment to assess how innovative the Showcase awards were perceived to be, in comparison with a sample of standard project grants. Expert panel members were asked to assess how ‘risky’, ‘novel’, ‘speculative’, ‘adventurous’ and ‘innovative’ each of five Showcase and five project grants were. The results showed that Showcase is fulfilling its objective of supporting high risk research and also that it is possible to apply novel techniques to evaluate unusual schemes. By applying epidemiological methods, in the form of a masked randomised trial, as much systematic error was eliminated as possible, thus making the result more robust. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Grant & Liz Allen, 1999. "Evaluating high risk research: an assessment of the Wellcome Trust's Sir Henry Wellcome Commemorative Awards for Innovative Research," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 8(3), pages 201-204, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:8:y:1999:i:3:p:201-204
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.3152/147154499781777513
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Laudel, Grit & Gläser, Jochen, 2014. "Beyond breakthrough research: Epistemic properties of research and their consequences for research funding," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 43(7), pages 1204-1216.
    2. Lettice, Fiona & Smart, Palie & Baruch, Yehuda & Johnson, Mark, 2012. "Navigating the impact-innovation double hurdle: The case of a climate change research fund," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(6), pages 1048-1057.
    3. Pelkonen, Antti – Thomas, 2014. "Project-based Funding and Novelty in University Research – Findings from Finland and the UK," ETLA Reports 29, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rseval:v:8:y:1999:i:3:p:201-204. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/rev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.