Research Incubation Fund Grant

Funder: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University

The Research Incubation Fund by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs supports early-stage research projects in social sciences. With annual awards of $30,000, it aims to help faculty develop proposals for major funding agencies. The fund emphasizes collaboration, planning, and access to resources necessary for successful project development. It addresses the challenges faced by nascent research teams, providing critical support to navigate the complexities of securing external funding and fostering innovative research endeavors.

Rationale
Research in the social sciences has undergone significant changes in the past few decades. The complexity of the subject matter, the sophistication of methods and theories, and the demands for expertise and information to launch innovative research are increasing at a rapid pace.
Modern research requires teamwork, specialized expertise, and planning. Its financial demands also require administrative skills and access to major outside funding. Such endeavors are potentially risky as well. Ideas may not pan out, effort becomes dissipated, and funding may be hard to come by. Nascent teams can get distracted and discouraged, and their funds easily depleted, often before a promising project is able to get off the ground. The Center's research faculty in international affairs needs support to think and plan. This is especially true in a project's early—and possibly unstable—stages.
This is a fund for incubation, to help large-scale research projects get launched and on a path toward securing major outside support.
The Weatherhead Center has earmarked, annually, three awards of $30,000 to support the development of faculty research proposals that are intended to be submitted to major outside funding agencies or foundations (the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and various private foundations).
Activities to be Funded
This plan should be described in the application for incubation funds.
Research must be related to the core interests of the Center, focusing on international, transnational, global, and comparative national issues that may address contemporary or historical topics, including rigorous policy analysis, as well as the study of specific countries and regions outside the United States.
Funds may be requested for the following purposes:

• Facilitating occasional meetings of collaborators (planning sessions, workshops, etc.).

Facilitating intensive work sessions with collaborators of a week to several weeks in length. Funds could include travel, food, and lodging costs to bring collaborators to Harvard for such sessions.
Providing summer salary (1/9) for affiliated principal investigators intending to devote full-time attention to project development for at least one month of the summer.
Providing infrastructural and consulting support, including access to funding advisers, budget development, and professional grant-writing expertise. The Center will strive to develop the infrastructure that will make such consulting expertise available on a regular and accessible basis.
Providing working space as necessary. This could include short-term office space for collaborators, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers intensively involved in project development. It could also include meeting and discussion space. To the extent possible, this space will be arranged from existing Center space allocations.Providing small honoraria to encourage researchers with funding expertise to review the project.

Eligibility

Principal investigators must intend to apply for major outside funding to carry out the bulk of the proposed research for an incubation-fund grant from the Weatherhead Center.