Narrative Approach to Research Funding

Actors in research policy must justify innovation funding with evidence. There must be reasons why public funds are mobilised for an innovation. However, facts and innovations are diametrically opposed: the more it is known about innovations, the less it is an innovation. So how can it be decided which innovations to fund? How can research policy deal with this challenge?

On behalf of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, researchers from the Wuppertal Institute and other European partners have developed a narrative approach to deal with uncertainty in research policy: Evidence-based Narratives (EBN). In the open access publication "Evidence-based narratives in European research programming" Prof. Dr. Philipp Schepelmann, Senior Researcher in the Urban Transitions Research Unit, and Susanne Fischer, Researcher in the Material Loops Research Unit at the Wuppertal Institute, as well as further authors exemplifies the approach using various examples from eco-innovation research in the EU Research Framework Programme Horizon Europe.

The article "Evidence-based narratives in European research programming" has been published in the European Journal of Futures Research and is available free of charge at the link below.