Institutional Caps for MBIE Transition Funding

Disclaimer: George was educated to be a good Christian gentleman and so when he is asked to talk about something positive, he does his best. He can also tell you that Matthew Chapter 13: Verse 12 reads, “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

I finally got around to watching the video of the most recent MBIE webinar update on the Funding System Reforms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ent5yPCwht8). I like the webinars. They are pretty focussed on matters in hand and, as with any delayed broadcast, you can check on social media to see if they are worth watching.

Pretty obviously I am not a huge fan of the policy reforms to date, because (if you must know) I think they are mostly hand waving, not directly addressing the problems claimed, and could well make them worse.

However, a lot of the latest webinar was about the institutional cap on proposals, which is about as direct a solution to a problem as you could hope for. Too many proposals coming in? Impose a cap. Fewer proposals.

The cap is not talked about as part of the System Reforms but MBIE is getting cut to the bone along with the rest of us. They are over the spam, so the institutions can do the first round of assessment at their cost rather than having MBIE pay for it. As soon as it was announced for Smart Ideas, whenever it was that the last Endeavour bidding round was held, you could see it coming in across the board, and now it has. Nobody died on the first outing, so why not?

As well as cutting the cost for MBIE the cap solves the issue of success rates. For Endeavour Programmes, as I recall because I can no longer find it on the MBIE website (no doubt incompetence on my part), the last round had a success rate of about 15%. Unless too many new organisation make bids, the new caps should mean a success rate of over 30%.

The real problem for the system is not so much the low success rates themselves, upsetting as that is to the researchers who miss out, but the cost of preparing unsuccessful bids, which just goes straight onto the institutional overhead. One of the organisations I was involved with did some handwaving in the direction of bidding costs and it looked like they were well in excess of the annual money brought in. I think if they had looked more closely if would have been worse, so very sensibly they didn’t.

Will the cap solve that issue? It depends.

Mostly on when the organisations do the triage on which proposals will go forward. If they can do it early on an outline or a presentation and a conversation with the research office, there will be huge savings across the system. If the institutions wait until essentially full proposals has been prepared (because how can you judge without the full thing in front of you…?) the costs will be absolutely massive. Everyone, and their dog, will be whipping up proposals and dropping them on their research office in the hope that a mention of AI and maybe some deep tech addressing a ‘multibillion dollar export market’ will get their proposal in under the cap. The earlier you can tell the researchers that their idea won’t fly for MBIE and won’t be submitted the better. MBIE are actually pretty clear about what they want so it shouldn’t be too hard.

But who wants to look Distinguished Professor Summa Cum Laude in the eye and say, “Sorry Sunshine, I don’t think this will get funded, you can’t put in a proposal this year.”

Which is important because if you get it wrong and your cap fills up with proposals that don’t get funded your cap falls for the next round (and I can’t imagine the cap idea will not be used in whatever Transition Funding turns into). The CRIs have always managed proposal numbers pretty tightly with (and if you look at the caps for BSI and Earth Sciences NZ and remember that Earth Sciences NZ is around a third the size of BSI you will see) mixed results. For the universities this is new as of the Smart Ideas cap in the last round. In fact, some of the Universities encouraged everyone to make proposals seemingly on the basis success was a dice roll and you had to be in to win. One large university provided proof that while the plot of the number of proposals vs. number of successes was straight to a point it did flatten out.

Which, perhaps, isn’t a helpful thought now that the caps have been set and Matthew 13:12 is taking hold.

However, now the institutions have a chance to manage the work that goes into bidding. Triage out the ones that will never get funded, stop the effort of preparing full proposals for them, and really focus on the ones the ones that will get funded. It’s not that they are bad ideas, its just that MBIE won’t give them money so look for who will instead of wasting your time. You can get on with something useful and stop offering stakeholders things that will never happen.

The thing I liked most though, was that in the Q&A session in the webinar, when asked what the strategy behind the caps was, there was a quick look around to see if anyone was going to mind and then they all said “None, it’s a purely operational decision.” The method used was chosen because it was transparent and based on objective data (so no one could fuss them about it). And so it is. Why muck around with strategy and setting new directions when you have the last three years’ data to fall back on?

I approve of that: well executed tactics will beat strategy every time.