Research Development & Research Leaders

Research development fills an observed gap in the competitiveness of research enterprises, faculty, and principal investigators.

Presented below is an adapted excerpt from chapter 6 of my book, Catalyzing Research: Research Leaders and the Complex Faculty/Administration Interface. (Previous articles in Medium’s Catalyzing Research publication presented adapted excerpts from the book’s introductory chapter and chapters on research leaders [part 1|part 2], core research facilities, & research centers and institutes.)

Research Development

Research organizations — in particular, universities, but also other types of institutions — have been increasingly focusing on research development for over a decade. While established research development offices have been operating at some institutions for longer than this (for example, at Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), organized research development functions at many leading and emerging research organizations are much more nascent.

As defined by the National Organization for Research Development Professionals (NORDP):¹

Research Development encompasses a set of strategic, proactive, catalytic, and capacity-building activities designed to facilitate individual faculty members, teams of researchers, and central research administrations in attracting extramural research funding, creating relationships, and developing and implementing strategies that increase institutional competitiveness.

Research development fills an observed gap in the competitiveness of research enterprises, faculty, and principal investigators. In effect, it asks:

In partnership with faculty, can skilled individuals at a research organization — almost by definition, individuals working at the complex faculty/administration interface — provide a suite of services that increase the competitiveness of faculty-led proposals or applications for federal or other external research funding competitions?

One demonstration of the expansion of research development over time is the growth of NORDP, the professional organization of research development practitioners. NORDP was formed in 2010 after a group of stakeholders organized the first research development conference during the summer of 2009. Thirty-five participants (myself included) took part in the 2009 conference. During NORDP’s 2016 conference, there were approximately 500 participants, and the organization currently has over 700 members.

A central focus of research development has always been on assisting faculty to identify and more successfully compete for large, center-scale, and often multi-investigator and multidisciplinary competitions. This focus comes, in part, from the often-complicated management and non-research components of these types of research applications and proposals. Other commonly observed research development focus areas include targeted assistance for junior faculty and for faculty in less research-active units within an organization.

Importance to the Research Enterprise

Over the last decade and continuing today, multiple forces — internal and external to research organizations — have amplified the importance of research development activities, programs, and offices to research enterprises. These include:

• The increasingly competitive challenge of securing federal and non-federal research funding
• Steep challenges faced by junior research-active faculty developing their own research programs and portfolios
• The growing role that externally funded research centers, institutes, and other large-scale awards — especially those competitively funded by federal agencies — are playing in the conduct of many research disciplines and as competitive measures of research organization prestige

During this period, more and more research organizations have seen the demonstrated or potential value of research development efforts — either organized, central research development offices (for example, housed in the Office of the Vice President for Research) or research development functions or capabilities organized in less centralized manners.

As NORDP further defines:¹

Research Development professionals initiate and nurture critical partnerships and alliances throughout the institutional research enterprise and between institutions — and with their external stakeholders. With the goal of enabling competitive individual and team research and facilitating research excellence, Research Development professionals build and implement strategic services and collaborative resources that span across disciplinary and administrative barriers within their organizations and beyond.

Research development activities are diverse and dependent on institution-specific characteristics. They include:¹

• Funding opportunity identification and targeted dissemination
• Grant/contract proposal development
• Research team building
• Interaction with funding agencies and institutional research administration and leadership
• Interaction with institutional federal relations
• Outreach activities and training

Complexity at the Faculty/Administration Interface

In the early days of research development, many research leaders and research organizations struggled to understand the potential value of these types of activities. Often, there was a significant lack of clarity around how research development differed from the pre-award activities of research administration.

Research administration services and offices have been essential parts of research organizations for decades, necessary as the nuts and bolts of submitting research proposals or applications and receiving and then administering research awards. While there are linkages from research administration offices to faculty — on both the pre-award side (for example, proposal and budgeting phases before submission of a research proposal) and the post-award side (for example, grant reporting and financial management after award of a research grant or contract) — the degree to which these are truly meaningful and valuable collaborations varies.

Just five to 10 years ago, many research leaders saw research development as either the same thing as pre-award research administration or something confusingly close. One of the most generous nods I recall hearing during that time from a hesitant research leader was that research development was like “pre-award on steroids.” While this characterization acknowledged that research development was something above and beyond conventional pre-award research administration, its unique elements were not understood, particularly as related to the need for intense collaboration with faculty.

Fast forwarding to today, research development offices are in place across scores of universities — with annual research expenditures of less than $50 million to more than $1 billion — as well as independent research institutes, research-active hospitals, and other research organizations. While some confusion remains about what research development means — sometimes complicated by use of the term “development” across many research organizations to refer specifically to fund-raising from philanthropic sources — momentum is now clearly behind research development as a meaningful and valuable infrastructural investment in the research enterprise.

Concurrently, it is clear that research development is firmly positioned at the complex faculty/administration interface. Research development involves skilled administrators (many, but not all, with advanced degrees in relevant scientific or academic disciplines) working collaboratively with faculty members. A prototypical example might involve providing assistance to faculty (or faculty teams) to increase the competitiveness of a complex proposal or application for a large, center-scale, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research competition from a federal agency, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, or Department of Energy. These are the kinds of competitions where research excellence — the domain of faculty — is vitally important and where new dimensions of well-designed research management, planning, and organization are also essential.

The subset of research development activities listed below (adapted from a list on the NORDP website) highlights the synergies between faculty and the administration that must be navigated for success.¹ In some ways, these activities blur the lines between what might have traditionally been considered in the faculty domain versus the administration domain — again demonstrating the complex faculty/administration interface that can be a contemporary playing field for research leaders to master.

• Convene and coordinate multidisciplinary interest groups
• Catalyze new cross-disciplinary research initiatives
• Sponsor catalytic research events (for example, research mini-symposia)
• Provide guidance and expertise for building and fostering connections and teams
• Facilitate collaborations among investigators — at one’s own institution and other institutions
• Provide proposal development support for individual investigator awards and for large, complex awards
• Perform grant writing of technical/scientific, evaluation, resources, administrative, timeline, communications, and outreach portions of proposals
• Suggest collaborating scientists for a proposal
• Edit proposal drafts
• Assist in coordinating institutional support requests
• Coordinate pre-submission peer reviews of proposal drafts
• Manage “red team” reviewers and external review processes
• Analyze proposal reviews and provide feedback to investigators or other institutional officials

Potential Risks and Rewards

Regardless of whether a research organization has a defined, well-functioning research development office, research leaders are wise to pay attention to the catalytic impacts that such services can provide to their faculty and the institution’s research enterprise.

Not included in this excerpt are specific examples in the book from my consulting experiences that highlight:

• Potential risks of research leader inaction — specifically: (1) unrealized competitiveness for large-scale grants, and (2) separation from research strategic directions
• Potential rewards from research leader attention — specifically: (1) capitalization on distributed research development expertise, and (2) enhanced faculty development opportunities

References

1. National Organization for Research Development Professionals. http://www.nordp.org. Accessed August 30, 2017.

This material is excerpted and adapted from the book, Catalyzing Research: Research Leaders and the Complex Faculty/Administration Interface.

RAND HALEY has devoted his career to helping organizations strengthen their scientific research enterprises. He has partnered with leadership and faculty at a wide range of leading and emerging research institutions and led research strategy and management projects at over 50 organizations.