Over the last decades, most EU countries have profoundly reshaped their public research funding systems by shifting from traditional institutional block-funding towards more project-based mechanisms. The main rationale underlying this evolution builds on the assumption that project funding would foster research performance through the introduction…

Subject to various restrictive requirements on project application and completion, funded projects are often affected by funding policies for the selection of research objects. This study explored the impact of scientific research funding policies on the funding and research by comparing the topic distribution of awards and papers. A total of…

Project funding rarely demands much change on behalf of the recipient. In contrast, cross-sectoral mobility funding requires recipients to change their environment and often some aspects of their research. There is a need to understand the impact on the researchers' experiences as knowledge producers within such programs, as part of the broader…

In this paper we investigate the practices and capacities that define successful societal interaction of research groups with stakeholders in mutually beneficial processes. We studied the Finnish Strategic Research Council's (SRC) first funded projects through a dynamic governance lens. The aim of the paper is to explore how the societal…

This article discusses characteristics and forms of international collaborative research projects (ICRPs) and provides conceptual considerations as well as initial empirical insights on the impact of funding conditions on ICRPs in the social sciences and external project funding. Specifically, by presenting a German case study of funding formats…

This article aims to understand how the public higher education sector is dealing with new challenges, like sustainability in services provision and delivery, which means to fulfil all the functions of a university. In order to fulfil their mission and be sustainable, the public higher education sector should start an innovation process, through…

Japan's operating budget for its national universities has been reduced since 2004 year by year, leaving a tight competition among universities in securing research funding. Urban universities with several prominent researchers can operate by securing competitive funding, joint research with companies, and donations, whereas small rural…

Across higher education, teachers have been inspiring themselves (and others) to apply pedagogical innovations grounded in a unifying intention: to prepare students for labour markets and societal challenges. Research-based education has been funded to promote pedagogical innovations with valuable impact on the students' academic success and/or…

How knowledge capitalism retools the scope of academic research and researchers is an issue which this article ties to the project market in the ethos of knowledge capitalism. In Finland, academic research has been forced to apply for funding in project-based activities reflecting European Union policies. The project market, which in this article…

Developing collaborative research teams to obtain external funding has been strongly encouraged by national policies in recent years. Therefore, Chinese academics have been eager to participate in such collaborative research teams. Using qualitative methods, we conducted in-depth interviews with 18 academics who worked at first-, second- and…

Over the past decades, science funding shows a shift from recurrent block funding towards project funding mechanisms. However, our knowledge of how project funding arrangements influence the organizational and epistemic properties of research is limited. To study this relation, a bridge between science policy studies and science studies is…

The purpose of this study was to analyse the determinants of the intention of academic researchers to collaborate on research projects with the carriers of innovation. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach was employed to analyse survey data from 266 stratified sampled researchers and 11 key informants from different disciplines in two…

The past three decades have witnessed a sharp reduction in the rate of growth of public research funding, and sometimes an actual decline in its level. In many countries, this decline has been accompanied by substantial changes in the ways that such funding has been allocated and monitored. In addition, the institutions governing how research is…

What does it all mean for universities as research institutions when the external funding acquired by their academics, already stretched intellectually and time poor, is going to those who simply do not have the time to carry out the proposed research, i.e. to the academics themselves? That is, how can a full-time teaching and research academic…

The main goal of the paper is to explore--both theoretically and empirically--the implications of project-based research funding for budgeting and financial management at public universities. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to provide a synthesized discussion of the possible impacts of project-based funding on university financial…