Sowing the seeds

Blogpost with references Sometimes, you need to start small. But where do you go to grow? In academia now, at least in my corner of the world, the phenomenon “seed grants” have entered the jargon in a big way. These are small grants, intended to bring people together, spark a collaboration, gather some first data…. Something to get to the bigger picture. For some areas, this is a very fruitful approach; in (veterinary) medical education, for instance. In a program run at the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine which was recently extensively reviewed for impact (Ward & Karabulut‐Ilgu, 2026), the authors found that a program for relatively small grants (mean of US$12,000 for individual grants) were very successful in promoting educational innovation in scholarship. The vast majority of the projects funded met the goals put forth in the original applications, and led to curricular implementation, while approximatly a third of the projects also led to dissemination in the form of academic publications in abstract form or in journals. These relatively small grants, had a big impact on education in that setting. This makes sense from the perspective of an educator: funding for education-related projects normally goes to people already involved in education in that context, who need a bit of extra space to make their project concrete, evidence based, and sharable. I myself have benefitted enormously from a grant from my university to stimulate Community Engaged Learning practices- not even so much through the project itself (the Covid pandemic was a huge obstacle in that project) but the network of university-wide educators with similar interests has been inspiring and invaluable. Seed funding is also found in more traditional, non education-research areas; I am most familiar with seed funding for animal welfare studies funded by charities or small university grants of €1000-€5000, which can be enough to advance a student project or fund small consumables needed to answer a very specific question or gather people to work on an idea. These seed funding mechanisms do have drawbacks. One of these, is that they heavily favour the already tenured. Since small projects need to run alongside other work, and don’t cover enough to pay salaries, those on short-term or fixed contracts will not be able to benefit from them. And then the question: if this is a really interesting project, where do we go from the seed grant to get funding that provides substantial body for investigation? That is an increasingly complicated issue, since grants are moving to ever-larger sums with ever-larger consortia involved. In the field of animal welfare, we have seen for instance the concentration of EU funding into the European Partnership for Animal Heath and Welfare, a €360 million partnership. This increase in scale may have some advantages, but also has drawbacks: the “hole” between seed funding and longer-term funding more of a chasm. This increase in size of grants also comes with drawbacks, as with larger grants there are fewer grants available, and those that are available come with ever-more administration and bureaucracy (Bloch et al., 2023), meaning that they are not necessarily more efficient in producing good research. In certain contexts, seed funding is very useful; what is missing is the pipeline afterward. Bloch, C. W., Kladakis, A., & Sørensen, M. P. (2023). Size matters! On the implications of increasing the size of research grants. In Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks (pp. 123–138). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800883086.00014 Ward, J. L., & Karabulut‐Ilgu, A. (2026). Small Grants, Big Impact: Outcomes of an Internal Excellence in Education Grant Program. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, e20260119. https://doi.org/10.3138/jvme-2026-0119