Evaluating high risk research: an assessment of the Wellcome Trust's Sir Henry Wellcome Commemorative Awards for Innovative Research

In 1996, the Wellcome Trust set up an annual competition to fund high-risk, non-obvious research in the biomedical sciences, called Showcase awards. The evaluation at the end of the first year involved an experiment to assess how innovative the Showcase awards were perceived to be, in comparison with a sample of standard project grants. Expert panel members were asked to assess how ‘risky’, ‘novel’, ‘speculative’, ‘adventurous’ and ‘innovative’ each of five Showcase and five project grants were. The results showed that Showcase is fulfilling its objective of supporting high risk research and also that it is possible to apply novel techniques to evaluate unusual schemes. By applying epidemiological methods, in the form of a masked randomised trial, as much systematic error was eliminated as possible, thus making the result more robust.