Sunday, February 12, 2023

Implementation of an improved review procedure for high-risk high-reward funding programs

As far as risks are concerned, there seems to be a consensus view on general funding strategies from different funders: government funding agencies tend to fund low-risk proposals while private foundations, at least in principle, should fund more of those so-called high-risk high-reward projects. Unfortunately, these high-risk high-reward funding programs, in their actual practice, often utilize similar measures that have been applied for funding main-stream or low-risk projects. Here, an improved review procedure for such programs will be tentatively proposed, which will be easy to implement and meanwhile biased properly toward high-risk, potentially paradigm-shifting proposals.

A possible solution to arbitrary evaluations

My letter to Physics Today was just published in its issue in October, 2024 . Hopefully, it’ll draw attention from a wider audience to the i...