Positive Evaluation for Emerging Fields Selection Procedure

How can we identify “high risk - high gain” ideas? How can we select the proposals most likely to trigger a paradigm shift? How can we fund something radically new? With the newly designed selection procedure for the Emerging Fields program, the FWF pledges to select projects that implement highly original or high-risk ideas. External experts have evaluated the decision-making process and confirm that it facilitates the selection of highly innovative teams for funding.

November 4, 2024

Header excellent=austria — The second track of the excellent=austria initiative, the Emerging Fields program, is aimed at teams of outstanding researchers who are doing pioneering work in basic research and are prepared to depart from established approaches. © FWF

The Emerging Fields program is aimed at teams of outstanding researchers who are doing pioneering work in basic research and are prepared to depart from established approaches. It gives researchers the opportunity to pursue particularly innovative, original, or high-risk ideas. The program focuses on funding research that has the potential to trigger a paradigm shift in its field.

New approaches to reviewing proposals

To better achieve the program objectives, the FWF applied a multi-stage selection process for the first time, based on the principle of filtering out particularly innovative, original, or high-risk ideas. A total of 45 teams submitted their project ideas. In March 2024, five teams at 14 research institutions received a funding commitment from the FWF with a total volume of €31 million.

To ensure the highest standards of evaluation and decision-making when awarding funding, the FWF has its procedures reviewed by independent experts on a regular basis. The external evaluation of the Emerging Fields program, carried out by the British Technopolis Group, is now available.

"Our headline conclusion is that the Emerging Fields programme has served a critical signalling and galvanizing function. By launching the programme, the FWF provided an opportunity for Austria-based researchers to propose a wide range of highly novel research ideas. Many of these were fully formulated only in response to the EF call," wrote the experts in their evaluation report.

Highly innovative research

In their summary, the international experts attest to the best-practice character of the selection process. The multi-stage process first identifies the most innovative and high-risk ideas, then reviews the quality of the proposed research and the qualifications of the team. In a broader context, this helps the Emerging Fields program fulfil its intended role of generating and implementing radically new and innovative ideas in Austria's basic research. The evaluation highlighted numerous indications of a very high degree of scientific innovation in the proposals, i.e., many new, never-before-submitted research ideas.

In their report, the experts also suggest some improvements and lessons learned that could be applied to aspects of future calls, which the FWF will take into account accordingly.

High quality standards for external evaluations

The FWF complies with the evaluation guidelines of the Austrian Platform for Research and Technology Policy Evaluation (fteval), and also integrated additional quality and transparency rules for this evaluation. These rules ensure a clear separation between the FWF and the evaluating experts and guarantee their independence.