OnCo
ideasIdea

Judge funding programme officers on burden alignment and trials completed

The people who run funding programmes are judged on money moved and papers produced. Judge them instead on whether their portfolios match the burden of disease and whether the trials they fund finish.

Funders change the performance framework for programme staff and study sections: portfolio burden alignment, share of funded trials completing on time and publishing, replication rates of funded findings, data-sharing compliance and patient-relevant outcomes reached. Publish these metrics per programme. This is an inexpensive governance change that alters what gets steered towards funding without changing peer review itself.

Hypothesis
Programmes whose officers are assessed on burden alignment and trial completion show measurable portfolio shift and higher trial completion within two funding cycles compared with programmes on conventional metrics.
Rationale
Incentives for intermediaries shape outcomes in development finance and venture capital; in science funding they have been left implicit. Trial non-completion runs at a fifth or more of academic oncology trials, and this is rarely counted against the programme that funded them.
What would test it
One funder adopts the metrics for half of its programmes (chosen at random) and compares portfolio and completion changes with the other half after two cycles.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

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