Would a Lottery Be Fairer? Assessing the Current State of NHMRC Ideas Grant Funding

Ideas Grants are designed to support bold, innovative research with the potential to drive significant advances in health and medicine. At their core, they aim to fund the very best ideas and enable high impact scientific outcomes.

In recent years, more researchers have applied for NHMRC Ideas Grants, but funding has not increased at the same pace. As a result, only a small percentage of applications are funded. This creates a problem. Many proposals are rated as ‘excellent’, yet only a fraction can be supported. When many strong applications compete for limited funds, the difference between being funded and missing out can come down to minute scoring gaps. For many researchers, this leads to a perception that outcomes depend partly on luck.

As competition intensifies and success rates decline, an important question emerges: can such a highly selective system still be considered fair? When the margin between successful and unsuccessful applications becomes increasingly narrow, some researchers are beginning to wonder whether an alternative approach, such as a lottery might, in fact, offer a fairer solution.

The Cost of Hyper-Competition

Low success rates in NHMRC Ideas Grants don’t just affect outcomes, they can shape researcher behaviour in ways that can undermine the scheme’s core purpose.

First, there is a growing temptation to play it safe. When funding is scarce, applicants may feel pressure to prioritise projects that appear more predictable or reviewer friendly. Yet Ideas Grants are explicitly designed to support bold, innovative thinking. Researchers should not shy away from ambitious or unconventional ideas and in fact, the scheme depends on them.

Second, the application process itself is highly demanding. Developing a competitive Ideas Grant can take months of work. With so many strong proposals going unfunded, researchers can find themselves caught in cycles of writing and rewriting applications, often at the expense of conducting research. In this environment, it also becomes difficult to give each application the time and careful attention it truly deserves, further compounding the inefficiencies of the process.

Over time, this combination of pressure and uncertainty can lead to frustration and burnout, raising important questions about how well the current system supports the very innovation it seeks to foster.

The Limits of Ranking

Peer review is the foundation of NHMRC funding decisions. Experts read and score each proposal based on quality, innovation, and feasibility. This system is designed to reward excellence.

However, when only a small percentage of proposals can be funded, it becomes very difficult to reliably identify the very best applications. Many top proposals are equally strong, which suggest that small differences in scores may not truly reflect meaningful differences in quality. Extreme competition could lead to certain biases that unintentionally favour those with strong track records or institutional support.

Some international funding bodies have tested a different approach. In these systems, peer review is still used to assess quality. Applications that meet a high standard are then entered into a lottery. Funding is randomly selected from this group of strong proposals. The idea is not to replace quality assessment. Instead, it recognises that once proposals reach a high level, ranking them precisely may not be reliable. But what does ‘fair’ really mean? Does it reflect a transparent process that is solely based on expert review? Are successful proposals truly reflective of the very best science? Do researchers from different career stages and institutions have equal opportunities?

Standing Out when Everyone Is Excellent

While broader system changes are ongoing, applicants still need to succeed within the current funding landscape. Here are some practical tips to help your proposal stand out in a highly competitive field.

Focus on clarity: Reviewers value proposals that are easy to follow, logically structured, and built around a clear aims and/or hypotheses.

Make the significance of your work explicit: Rather than assuming your reviewers understand the important health problem, clearly articulate the demand for your work and why your research matters. This is what distinguished research that is needed from what is merely interesting.

Balance innovation and feasibility: Bold ideas are encouraged, but they must be supported by a convincing and realistic plan that identifies risk and provides mitigating strategies to support success.

Build a team of experts: Each member’s track record should build on the others to create complementary team of experts that emphasises meaningful outputs, not just quantity. Ensure your CIA is well chosen, with the leadership, expertise, and vision to unify the group and drive the research outcomes.

Seek Critical Feedback: Colleagues who have served as reviewers can provide insight into common weaknesses. Early critique is invaluable. Honest, constructive critique helps you refine your ideas, clarify your arguments, and strengthen the overall impact of your application before submission.

Emotional Resilience: Given the competitive environment, even strong applications may not succeed, so it is important to treat feedback as a tool for improvement rather than a reflection of your capability.

Ultimately, while the Ideas Grant landscape is highly competitive and sometimes unpredictable, it remains a vital mechanism for supporting transformative research. By understanding the attributes of successful Ideas Grants to make strategic choices that embrace innovation, researchers can maximise their impact and meaningfully contribute to the advancement of health and medical science.

Where to Next for Research Funding Reform

How can a system be meaningfully reformed when reviewers assign only whole-number scores, yet funding decisions hinge on differences as small as 0.01 and without a panel discussion to contextualise or challenge those margins? Perhaps a partial lottery system for research funding is the way forward or combining it with an initial peer-ranked ‘expression of interest’ could first identify high-quality proposals and then randomly allocate funding among those deemed ‘fundable’. This approach could reduce bias in close decisions, increase transparency and accountability, and ease the stress of near-miss outcomes. Critics may worry that this weakens confidence in merit-based assessments and avoids addressing the core issue of reliably ranking equally strong applications because bias may still lead to the same applications being selected in the initial rounds. Ultimately there needs to be greater trust in a system that fairly identifies innovative and impactful research while still retaining the strengths of quality, expert peer review to promote equity and long-term sustainability.