Exploring Cross-Grant Interactions in Research Funding: "Amplifying What Is Possible"

Abstract

Researchers often work across multiple concurrent grants, yet studies of research funding, its features, goals, and impacts, typically examine single grants in isolation. This overlooks the broader context of funding configurations within which researchers organize their work. This exploratory paper explores cross-grant interactions (or co-use), through interviews and mapping of the grant configurations of 12 principal investigators in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. The analysis shows that cross-grant interactions were reported in both parallel and sequential forms, enabled mainly by overlaps of people, infrastructure, and knowledge. Interviewees described such interactions as producing beneficial synergies, including expanded capacity and knowledge transfer, while also identifying grey zones related to attribution, administration, funder rules, and personnel or resource allocation. The funding configurations were more heterogeneous than expected in size, grant number, funder origin, researcher role, and funder requirements. This heterogeneity limited the identification of stable configuration archetypes in the present sample. It nevertheless demonstrates that single-grant approaches can miss much of the funding context relevant to research practice and evaluation. The paper calls for greater attention to cross-grant interactions, not by treating all overlap as either misuse or synergy, but to develop practices that make legitimate co-use visible, assessable, and, where appropriate, supportable.