A significant part of the potential impact of the ERC’s funding schemes will be in their value or contribution to the research careers of individual recipients and in their ‘added value’ for the research communities within which these recipients are working.
There may also be added value for research organisations that host grant recipients. All these issues were explored by EURECIA’s case studies of starting independent researchers and advanced investigators.
This work featured in-depth interviews with researchers to identify any differences to researchers’ career trajectories, to their research content, and any impacts upon research communities and organisations that are attributable to the ERC funding schemes. Up to 40 researchers who received ERC grants will be interviewed (20 researchers for each scheme) and around 10 researchers who passed the quality threshold but were not selected to receive a grant (up to five researchers for each scheme).
Semi-structured interviews within this work package explored: how the project submitted for an ERC grant emerged and developed; the level of novelty of the research (e.g. its riskiness, whether it is a new stream of research or part of an existing portfolio for the researcher, and the relationship of the research to the research community’s mainstream); the research funding context of the researcher (e.g. the researchers’ reasons for applying to the ERC, and alternative funding opportunities that were available for the particular project that was applied for); relationships with the researcher’s host organisation; impact on the host organisation; and the impact of the ERC grant on the researcher’s career trajectory.
Dr Grit Laudel led this work. Grit’s selection of interviewees was based on information about the whole population of awardees drawn from the survey work and from EURECIA’s research into host research organisations.
Share: