“If somebody drops an idea in our lap and says, ‘Write a proposal’, it would be quite difficult,” says Ian Eden, a senior consultant at Arttic in Derby, UK.
It helps to understand that funding finders cannot do all the work themselves. Researchers must consider how they will work with the consultant and other project collaborators to make the most of the time invested in the grant application. “We don’t claim to have any special powers, but we have lots of experience.”īut hiring a funding finder itself requires careful planning. Nothing stops a scientist from going directly to the US National Science Foundation for funding information, notes Ram May-Ron, vice-president of FreeMind. In return, they offer familiarity with the applications process and established relationships with the programme officers and businesses that are offering the funds. Types of funding finder range from services offering online information packs that cost a few hundred dollars to consulting firms such as FreeMind, which can charge up to 10% of the grant total. He is waiting for decisions on two applications that he made last year with their help, and on another that was put together in March. So about 18 months ago, when he needed money to develop a device for sampling blood to speed up clinical diagnoses, Kissinger hired FreeMind, a funding consultancy with offices in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Jerusalem. “And that’s not really the thing most of us in science enjoy doing,” he says. For one thing, the paperwork is more onerous.
But he says that it is harder to get funding now than when he began. Having founded his first company in the 1970s, Kissinger, an entrepreneur and bioanalytical chemist who works part-time at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is no stranger to the challenges of raising start-up capital and research money.
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