Winning Grants

As an academic or a small business owner, you will need to write grants  at some point in your career. Writing them though is not enough, what  you also need to know is how to win grants. Much has been written about  writing grants, the mysterious special ability called ‘grantsmanship’,  so it occurred to me that there is a need to come at this differently  and spill the beans. The difficulty in getting a grant, in particular an  NIH grant like an R01 in the USA is often described, it is competitive  and gets tougher every year. Your proposal therefore must stand out, it  must connect with the reviewers. This is true for all types of grants,  give the reviewer what they want always. But also, you need to connect  to the program officer, the committee that ultimately makes funding  decisions and you must take care of a myriad of other details outside of  the main event which is describing the “science”. This means you cannot  rely on just out-writing the competition, it is more than that as you  have to out-think, out-strategize and out-schmooze them. If you have  been continually funded for decades that is terrific, but if you want to  keep being funded there is no guarantee what got you there will keep  you there. What was a hot technology 4-5 years ago is not the new thing  anymore, you will need to do something different, but what? You  therefore need to not only think about writing great grants, you need to  put it into practice and win them. Having written and won grants from  the NIH and DOD over the past 17 years (and longer by the time you read  this) I possess a valuable perspective.

Each grant and study  section will be different. Whether a big or small grant it does not seem  to make a difference the reviewers will critique your efforts, they may  not like it, they may reject your ideas or they may love it. You have  some small degree of control until the proposal leaves your hands or  more correctly you click ‘submit’. You will need to differentiate your  grant from the hundreds of others in many ways, but you cannot change  who you are, your history so how you describe yourself and team will  also have an impact. You could spend hundreds of hours on your proposal  or just a day and the outcome might still be the same. This small book  is a summary of my own personal experiences and will provide some advice  that will help you learn how to do a better job of winning grants.

This  book is written by a scientist who writes the grants and develops  commercial products;Provides a unique perspective on what you need to  write better grants;Teaches you how to continually win grants;This book  provides examples from the authors own grant applications;The reader  will be inspired to start a company to win small business grants.