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COPYRIGHT 1999 Society of Research Administrators, Inc.
INTRODUCTION
In times of dwindling resources and increasing workloads, research administrators need to direct their time and energy toward academic units and faculty members who can benefit most from their assistance. It is not frequently appreciated outside (and sometimes inside) academe that, on the average, most universities make financial investments when they accept grants and other sponsored projects awards, even if all allowed facilities and administrative costs are fully recovered.
This is mainly because the relevant regulations governing the determination of allowable sponsored project costs, such as the OMB A-21, do not allow for full recovery of all costs related to the performance of sponsored projects (Yale Science Policy Committee, 1996). Moreover, many funding agencies do not pay for the full direct costs of projects they support. In other cases, the institution may be committed to carrying out a mission-driven project with, or without, external support. When such projects are supported through a grant, the institution considers the grant a cost-saving contribution that reduces the institution's investment.
Investments through budget allocation for such "uncompensated" elements of sponsored project costs are legitimate components of the resource allocation process at universities. The allocation of faculty capacity for research and sponsored project (RSP) activities, for example, can be a form of resource investment in an institutional research development program. Such a program, if properly directed toward those units and faculty who can best benefit from it, should produce a distribution in the utility of faculty RSP capacity with outcomes that are consistent with institutional goals and missions. The outcomes or products of a research development program are the results of the utility of faculty capacity devoted to research and sponsored project activities. Thus, outcomes will change as that utility changes.
Relating faculty capacity to the products of research and sponsored projects may evoke images of a corporate production model. Such a view of faculty productivity is not regarded with favor by some in the academic community, although Verry and Davies (1976), among others, have developed useful models of university production that parallel those used within corporations.
Research development, like most other processes at a university, requires the input of resources to produce outputs consistent with the research goals and missions of the institution. In developing effective strategies for the use of university resources to achieve these goals, it is appropriate to relate input capacities to output measures that do not depend on the model assumed for university production. Besides such productivity measures as the number of proposals submitted and the number and dollar value of awards received by a unit, there is a need for understanding the underlying factors that affect the research and sponsored project performance of units in research institutions (Monahan & Fortune, 1995).
As part of an effort to gain such understanding, we will consider the distribution of faculty capacity (fraction of FTE effort) utilized for sponsored project activities as a critical factor in the performance of sponsored projects. Then, we will develop a model-independent RSP activity measure that can be readily used in creating generic strategies for research and sponsored project development.
DEVELOPMENT OF SPONSORED PROJECTS
The services that a research administrator provides to an academic unit should be designed to meet the needs of individual elements (faculty, research group, center, etc.) of the unit. This requires knowledge of the sponsored project history and current activities of all elements of the unit. based on such knowledge and in collaboration with relevant personnel in the unit, a research...
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