Dear Readers, please see below today’s piece for an announcement. I am thrilled to share this news with you.

This is the final installment in our series on preparing for short-turnaround and new funding opportunities. So far, we have covered the importance of keeping your professional presence current, assessing fit quickly, and preparing your proposal infrastructure before you need it.

This week, I want to focus on a different kind of readiness: knowing what ideas and capabilities you can offer before a solicitation appears.

You do not want to read a new solicitation and then ask, “What idea can I invent from scratch to fit this?” That puts you in a reactive position. You are in a stronger position when you already understand your research directions, capabilities, collaborators, data, and possible contributions, and can then ask whether one of them has a real fit.

This does not mean writing draft proposals in advance, which I do not advise. Rather, you want to have several concepts developed enough that you can recognize whether one of them could be adapted when a new opportunity appears.

One way to do this is through a research menu. I have spoken about research menus before and will link to a video below that explains the idea in more detail. In brief, a research menu gives you several fundable directions you can discuss with a program officer or other funder. Instead of showing up with one idea and asking for a yes-or-no response, you can offer a few possible directions and start a more useful conversation about which one may be most relevant.

That approach is especially useful for more traditional investigator-centered opportunities. These are opportunities where you are largely trying to explain the project you want to lead, why it matters, why your approach is strong, and why you are prepared to do the work. Many single-investigator and smaller-team opportunities fit this model.

For early-career faculty, this kind of preparation is extremely valuable. A research menu can help you clarify your ideas, talk to funders more effectively, and avoid becoming overly attached to one proposal concept before you know whether it fits.

However, some newer opportunities require a different kind of framing.

For large, mission-driven or coordinated initiatives like those associated with the Genesis Mission, the funder may be asking not only whether your individual project is strong but also whether your work fits in the portfolio they are trying to build.

In this case, you are not only explaining your research and its intellectual merit. You must also explain your contribution in terms of deliverables or specific outcomes, which many researchers are not used to doing if they have been working mainly in the world of grants rather than contracts.

In this case, your contribution could take many forms. Your team might generate a dataset, validate a model, provide a testbed, develop a method, build a software tool, connect to a user community, contribute specialized equipment, or support integration across teams.

This means a fundable concept may not be centered on a research question. It could be a clear description of a capability, dataset, platform, collaboration, infrastructure, method, or role your team could provide.

There are several things you can prepare before a solicitation appears.

One is a capability statement. This is a clear description of what your lab or team can actually do. What data can you generate? What systems can you test? What instruments, methods, or environments do you have access to? What user communities or application areas do you understand?

Another is a data-readiness summary. If opportunities emphasize AI-ready data, reproducibility, metadata, reuse, or shared infrastructure, you should know what data you have, what condition they are in, what restrictions exist, and what would be needed to make them useful to others.

You may also need an infrastructure or platform description. If a funder is trying to build labs, test beds, software platforms, workflows, standards, or user communities, you should be able to describe what you could build, contribute, or connect to.

A collaboration map can also be useful. You never want to think of collaborators as only people who provide letters of support. However, for some calls, you will need to provide more detailed information than you may be used to about what specific functions they will perform within the project.

In some cases, you may even need to describe governance or management structures. If the opportunity asks for a nontraditional team structure, rapid decision-making, or a way to coordinate across organizations, you should not be inventing that language from scratch at the last minute.

All of this helps you move beyond broad alignment language.

It is not enough to say that your work is AI-enabled, scalable, interdisciplinary, mission-relevant, or connected to national priorities. You need to say what the work actually provides. What will be produced? What gap does it fill? Who will use it? What does it connect to? Why does the larger effort need this contribution?

This is a lot to keep track of, especially in a funding environment where familiar programs are changing, budgets are under pressure and new opportunities can appear with large funding totals attached. It is natural to get excited when you hear about new programs, especially when they involve substantial investment.

But if you use only the same approach you would use for a traditional investigator-centered proposal, you may not get the results you want.

At the same time, traditional programs are not going away. You still need to be able to describe a project on its own terms, with a strong research vision, compelling intellectual merit, and a persuasive explanation of why you are prepared to lead the work.

So, this is not either/or. It is both/and.

You need to be ready for traditional investigator-centered opportunities, and you also need to be ready for mission-centered opportunities where the question is not only, “Is this a good project?” but also, “What role does this work play in the larger mission?”

The stronger position is to have your ideas, capabilities, collaborators, data, and expected contributions partly clarified before the opportunity appears. Then you are not starting from zero. Instead, you are asking whether the work you are already building has a real role to play.

I am pleased to share that I have signed a contract for a forthcoming book with University of California Press. UC Press is one of the largest university publishers in the United States, and it is gratifying to see their confidence in the importance of making the research funding process more understandable and accessible.

The book will build on many of the themes covered in the Wise Investigator newsletter, while also adding new material and updated guidance. It is designed to be a practical, concise reference with graphics, worksheets, checklists, and implementation-oriented tools that researchers can return to when they need help with a specific part of the funding process.

A major focus will be the “hidden curriculum” of research funding—what researchers need to know but are usually not taught.

I send a big thank you to the readers of this newsletter. Your engagement and feedback have been inspiring, and they have helped confirm the need for this kind of practical guidance.

I made a short video explaining the research menu, which is a simple document you can use when reaching out to program officers. Instead of trying to guess the one perfect idea to send, a research menu lets you share a few possible directions and gives the funder something useful to react to. This can be an easier starting point than a fully developed white paper or concept paper. Our clients get great results with these!

Need to get your research funded, this year? Check out our 12-week program to get you there.

Ready to book a call to discuss how our program can support faculty at your institution? Let’s chat!