Training
Appropriating frameworks so as to better understand and situate research practice
Building solid research projects
Setting up a research project requires time, energy, and resources. When the same challenges come back from one call to the next, this investment can become substantial.
For researchers, this can mean spending many weeks working on a proposal—generally under tight deadlines—without necessarily understanding what is actually expected or why a previous scientifically excellent project had not been selected.
At department and faculty levels, time and resources are also committed, yet the experience gained does not necessarily lead to a lasting improvement in a team’s ability to improve their projects.
Developing the project,
not just the proposal
Part of the challenge stems from the fact that building a research project and developing a research proposal do not require exactly the same skills.
Objectives, activities, responsibilities, timelines, resources, budget, risks, impact, and commercialisation can be seen as separate sections to be completed when putting together the application.
Yet, in reality, they form an interdependent whole. A change in activities affects workloads, required resources, the budget, or the timeline. An identified risk may lead to a reevaluation of the project’s organisation.
Building a project therefore involves articulating these different dimensions and ensuring their coherence before submission.
Understanding
what is actually being evaluated
Funding programmes serve specific objectives and define criteria against which projects will be evaluated.
Explicita training enables participants to stop viewing these criteria as mere writing constraints and instead to question what they actually allow evaluators to assess.
For each dimension of the project, researchers are required to ask themselves:
• Why this information is requested
• What it allows us to assess
• Whether a project truly demonstrate this
• If something is missing, whether it is a matter of unclear explanation or a weakness in the project
This shift in perspective allows the project to be put to the test before its evaluation, when the team still has room to manoeuvre to strengthen it.
Developing
lasting skills
The goal is not to simply learn how to better complete a specific application or to apply a formula to a call for proposals.
The training aims to develop a researcher’s ability to build, test, and clearly articulate sound projects, and then to apply this competence to various funding mechanisms.
Teams can thus build on the experience gained from one project to the next to better anticipate the project development process and to reduce avoidable weaknesses that unnecessarily consume time and resources.