Substantial funding
Why you should position your work for securing substantial funding.
Introduction
If you are successful in your field, you will, at some point, need substantial funding.
The need to increase your productivity and impact grows exponentially as you become more successful.
The scope and scale of your efforts to secure funding should also increase.
Understanding Substantial Funding
What most people do not realise is that they can be part of a big project and they can help to secure substantial funding for things they really care about.
Substantial funding is typically directed toward solving problems that hold back entire industries or sectors.
Consider the Human Genome Project: the lack of a complete human genome sequence was a major bottleneck for progress in healthcare, biotechnology, and genetics. The organizations and professionals positioned around sequencing and analyzing genomic data were the ones that played a leading role.
Strategic Positioning for Major Funding
If you want to increase your chances of being part of a substantially funded initiative, position your work around the biggest challenges that are preventing progress in your field. These challenges might include:
Developing better predictive models
Establishing new frameworks or methodologies
Addressing regulatory and policy barriers
Creating new and advanced technologies
Building large-scale data infrastructure
It's about having a strategy. The biggest advantage of strategy is that it helps you avoid being tactical hell: short-term, transactional work that limits long-term impact.
What you want to do is transform that cycle of chasing incremental opportunities into a flywheel that accelerates funding and impact over time.
Benefits of Substantial Funding
1. Financial Scale and Sustainability
By substantial funding, we mean €5 million or more, often through large-scale initiatives, partnerships, or consortium projects. When structured correctly, these projects lead to more opportunities. A significant portion of funding in most industries now flows through large-scale collaborations and high-impact initiatives.
The average major funding award is now in the millions, and collaborative projects dominate many funding programs.
This trend underscores that professionals and organizations seeking substantial funding should be prepared to operate in a collaborative, goal-oriented manner.
Positioning your work in line with these trends—team-based, strategically important, and high-impact—is increasingly vital for securing major funding.
Large-scale efforts also benefit from a "plurality of funding sources"—governments, philanthropies, and industry—each bringing unique strengths.
Alternative funding sources are becoming increasingly important, and large initiatives often mix funding types to achieve their goals.
Many major breakthroughs, from large-scale infrastructure projects to game-changing technological advancements, have been achieved by leveraging diverse funding streams.
This is how a substantially funded initiatives act like a flywheel driving the accumulation of more and more funding streams.
2. More Powerful Results
Large grants and investments enable teams of diverse experts to work together on complex challenges.
Studies of large-scale collaborations show that these projects benefit from pooled resources, diverse data sets, and interdisciplinary expertise, achieving results that would not be possible with smaller, isolated efforts.
For example, an international partnership can access and analyze far more data or resources than a single organization.
The collaborative approach also fuels innovation: different perspectives cross-pollinate to solve problems in novel ways.
Many pressing challenges—such as eliminating chronic disease, curing cancer, climate change, digital transformation, or supply chain resilience—cannot be tackled by a single entity alone.
3. Deeper Collaborations
As Nobel laureate Harold Varmus noted, "Science is not a solitary activity; it's a team sport." The same applies to large-scale problem-solving across industries.
Nothing gets people working together in a more tight-knit way than a project worth €5, €10, or €15 million.
It is also an opportunity to strengthen relationships and develop truly meaningful collaborations.
One example of this is a multi-organization initiative I helped design and guide, the U-BIOPRED project.
Now, 17 years later, the partners involved still collaborate on the resources and data that were generated in that project.
The project also promoted collaboration with other international initiatives, as shared insights helped validate findings and approaches.
4. Valuable Assets
Substantial funding often leads to the development of valuable assets such as large datasets, infrastructure, or shared methodologies. These resources can dramatically accelerate progress, as demonstrated by initiatives like the UK Biobank, which provides researchers worldwide with access to an unprecedented wealth of health and genetic data.
Large-scale funding facilitates open innovation, yielding datasets, tools, and infrastructure that would be out of reach otherwise. For an individual or organization, leveraging consortium resources can accelerate development (e.g., you might test new technologies on a massive dataset that your organization didn’t have to collect alone).
Moreover, big grants and investments often include support for specialized facilities, expert teams, or high-end technology, effectively expanding capabilities for everyone involved.
The net benefit is a rising tide that lifts all boats: each participant can achieve more with shared resources than they could individually.
5. Career and Organizational Development
Large-scale initiatives provide excellent growth opportunities, offering:
Exposure to multiple industries, disciplines, and stakeholders
Leadership opportunities
Network building across sectors
Expansion into new markets or domains
It is also the case that in most large-scale projects, there is more work to do than there are planned resources. This means that emerging leaders have opportunities to step up and take charge. It could be as simple as drafting the first version of a policy that will be used in the project, or it could be more complex, like leading the formation of a broader multi-stakeholder initiative.
These projects are great opportunities to explore new career or business directions and build the connections needed to make them happen.
Being part of a major initiative allows individuals and organizations to build their professional networks beyond their existing sphere—connecting with experts in academia, industry, government, and philanthropy. These connections can lead to new opportunities, partnerships, or investments later on.
In summary, a well-funded collaborative environment can function as an incubator, providing skills, connections, and opportunities that accelerate growth.
6. Meaningful Impact
When it comes down to it, solving the problems that are holding back an entire sector will have an outsized impact. It will be clear that what you have built is not just a drop in the ocean of contributions.
At a certain point, successful professionals and organizations realize that while they have secured funding and achieved success, their industry or field still lags behind its full potential.
Substantial funding is an opportunity to resolve the barriers holding back progress.
Economic, technological, and social systems have built-in feedback loops that maintain the status quo. Substantially funded initiatives enable the development of feedback loops that push toward exponential transformation.
7. Enhanced Visibility and Influence
Large-scale projects multiply opportunities for recognition, industry influence, and thought leadership. High-impact projects often lead to:
More speaking engagements and leadership opportunities
Increased media and industry attention
The ability to set agendas and shape industry standards
For example, an analysis of the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s (IMI) publications shows that collaborative public-private partnerships result in higher impact publications.
8. Leadership and Long-Term Recognition
Participation in prominent, substantially funded projects establishes leadership credentials. Opportunities to drive forward new ideas and concepts often emerge during these initiatives.
The impact on the industry is also long-term—landmark initiatives often become reference points that guide subsequent developments (e.g., the launch of a new technology, a policy framework, or a validated market trend). (6).
For an individual or organization, being part of a large initiative can cement their reputation as an industry leader and open doors to sustained funding and influence.
Conclusion
Substantial funding is not a one-off effort but the result of persistent strategic positioning. Aligning your work with the key bottlenecks in your industry brings multiple benefits that can transform both your impact and trajectory.
If you want to pursue substantial funding, start with my free guide on how to position yourself for success. It includes the actionable insights you need to develop and implement a securing substantial funding.