How To Sell Your NIH R01 Research Idea
One of the questions I get most often from early career researchers is also a question that can lead to sabotaging the success of your R01 before you even get started.
How can you sell your research idea?
It’s not that it’s a bad question. It’s the mindset that comes along with that question that can lead researchers in the wrong direction.
Let’s shift your thinking about your R01 and what it means to sell your idea.
Researchers Don’t Sell
If you feel icky and manipulative at the thought of selling your research idea or selling your science, I’m giving you permission to stop thinking about it that way.
What “selling” really means in this context is generating enthusiasm for your research idea and persuading your reviewers to recommend your project for funding. So yes, you’re “selling” your multi-year, multi-million dollar research project—but really you’re just getting everyone as excited as you are about the research.
When we work with PIs to get their R01 resubmissions funded, what we’re actually doing is helping them refine a narrative about why their research matters and how it’s going to advance the field so that we can generate that enthusiasm among reviewers.
We help them emphasize how it’s going to improve human health, connect why the research needs to be done, how they’re going to do it, and the big impact of the research.
If you can connect those elements in your grant, you’re generating enthusiasm for your research idea. Who Cares About Your Idea?
That excitement comes through all the different puzzle pieces of your story.
You might have been taught that having a really good research idea was enough and the rest would take care of itself, but that’s just not the case for any research grant you submit.
And the reason for this is because your research idea has to connect to something. It needs to be connected to the reason why the research needs to be done in the first place. It also needs to connect to the impact of the outcomes of the project.
In other words, who cares?
Your job in any grant is to make sure that the “who cares” part is super clear and evident and connects to the idea you are proposing.
In the background and significance section of your grant you have an opportunity to share the origin story of your research idea and central hypothesis and show your thinking in terms of how you developed this research idea in the first place.
Share your supporting evidence, whether it’s from the literature or your own preliminary data. Then, lead your reviewers down a path that clearly shows how you got to where you are now and how you crafted your big research question or central hypothesis.
The next step to lead them down is how you are going to test your hypothesis and how you’re going to answer that question. And the last stop is spelling out the result and the overall positive impact of the work.
By themselves, these are just components, but when you connect all of these pieces successfully, you’re answering the “who cares?” question and generating enthusiasm for your project.
If you found this helpful, I strongly encourage you to sign up for our free resource library. We have lots of tools and tutorials in there to help you write a stronger NIH grant that gets reviewers excited about the potential of your research idea. There are also lots of other tools in there to help you plan and prepare your next grant so that you are organized and ready to go.