Image: marchmeena29, via Getty Images
Limits introduced in New Zealand fund may hit early career researchers hardest
Application caps in New Zealand’s flagship Endeavour Fund may have unintended consequences, the New Zealand Association of Scientists has warned.
On 2 July, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment announced that institutions would be allocated limited numbers of application slots for the fund’s Smart Ideas stream.
Association co-president Troy Baisden told Research Professional News that there were “significant concerns” in the sector about the changes.
“It seems clear the changes are motivated largely by less resources within the ministry to staff a two-stage assessment process. This is concerning because it pushes cost of screening onto institutions,” he said.
“The caps are simply an imperfect kludge at a time when many individuals will be trying to replace large blocks of funding lost from the National Science Challenges [which have now ended] and projects undertaken directly for ministries. This change will worsen the impacts of hyper-competition for limited funding.
“The big losers are likely to be the early and mid-career researchers who were able to access this funding mechanism as a significant stepping stone in their careers.”
More conservative system
Smart Ideas grants offer up to NZ$1 million over two or three years. The larger Research Programmes stream has not been given caps, but both programmes suffered small cuts in total funding in the 2025-27 Endeavour Fund investment plan published on 2 July.
Greg Bodeker, director of the private research firm Bodeker Scientific, said he believed the changes would be “bad for New Zealand”.
His firm has been allocated two application slots due to its past success, and it currently holds a Smart Ideas grant. But he said that the changes would make application slots “precious” and would cause institutions to overlook early career researchers. Institutions will “back proposals which have a higher chance of success, and they are more likely to be led by seasoned principal investigators”. This would be despite Smart Ideas being aimed at innovative ideas with commercial potential.
“I suspect it’s going to result in a more conservative science system and a more risk-averse science system.”
Bodeker said there might also be unexpected consequences where researchers sought to attach themselves to other projects to circumvent the cap system. In some cases that could be a benefit to collaboration, he said.
“I certainly don’t blame the ministry. The government has cut their operational funding and their science funding.”
New investment signals
The new system will be reviewed after a year, an online information session on 11 July was told.
In the session, officials from the ministry fielded questions from the sector. Alan Coulson, manager of contestable investments, agreed that the new round of Endeavour would be more focused on commercialisation of research.
“Clearly you’ll have seen the new investment signals. It does put more of a focus on commercialisation. That’s the focus that the incoming minister has wanted.”
Danette Olsen, the ministry’s general manager for science system investment and performance, said the impact of the caps on early career researchers would be assessed. “If there is significant drop-off and we have concerns about that, we always have the potential to add early career criteria.”
She said the assessment would also look at whether the caps on Smart Ideas grants push more applications into the fund’s Research Programmes stream. “We are aware that could be a potential consequence for setting a cap,” she said. A cap could also be brought in on Research Programmes, but there would be a consultation first.
Olsen said that a change in the wording around the application of the Vision Mātauranga policy, which encourages research that includes Māori knowledge, was “just editorial”.
“I don’t think there’s a shift away from [a focus on] people,” she said.
Baisden said that the sector saw the new wording as “falling back to the outdated 2008” policy, which would create pressure on researchers to engage in consultation that might be “neither useful nor properly supported financially”. This would have an impact on the Māori groups and researchers who were expected to take part.
Several questions in the session were about the fairness of the way caps were set and applied.
Coulson told the session that the cap allocations had been set by taking the average number of contracts won by an organisation over the past three years and applying an undisclosed “multiplier” to come up with a number. He said the formula would not be released because “we retain the right to change that year on year”.