CY Cergy University

Challenge:
Identifying new funding opportunities to support one of France’s most active research centres
CY Cergy Paris University (CY), formed by joining the University of Cergy-Pontoise, EISTI, EPSS and ILEPS, works in close collaboration with the ESSEC Business School. CY is a popular centre of research and teaching with over 20,000 students, 600 PhD students, and 600 researchers. It is one of the most active research centres in France with an ambition to be recognised as one of the world’s top 200 universities by 2030. To help realise this, CY had to consider ways to increase their financial support when their internal funding department were already overstretched, dealing with time-intensive monitoring of opportunities and responding to around 600 calls a year in the last two years.

Isabelle Hoefkens, Head of Research Funding Office at CY recognised that the internal funding team needed a service that would reduce the amount of time spent manually monitoring opportunities and help to identify a more diverse range of funders offering less competitive calls. This would broaden their funding reach and increase the likelihood of securing additional income – importantly, reducing the volume of responses required and increasing their chance of success.

Solution:
Monitoring a large and diverse number of funders
CY required an easy-to-use monitoring tool that would bring together an array of funders from across the globe, especially ones less
well known, with potentially less competitive tenders. With an endorsement from another university, CY selected ResearchConnect from Idox, a dedicated research funding database specialising in identifying opportunities for research and academic institutes. Supported by Idox’s experienced team of funding experts and the capability to deliver up to the minute monitoring service – ResearchConnect was the ideal solution to help CY achieve greater funding success.

Outcome:
150,000 Euros secured on a ‘niche’ discipline : Hydrocarbon
“All of the funds we’ve responded to via ResearchConnect have been funds that we weren’t previously aware of so had never applied for before. This gave us the opportunity to recommend different funds and respond to calls that we stood a better chance of securing.”
CY’s greatest success to date has been securing 150,000 Euros of funding from the Canadian government (province of Nova Scotia) on the theme of hydrocarbons.

“This has allowed us to recruit a post-doctoral student and work on a ‘niche’ discipline that is not easy to finance. We now have the capability through ResearchConnect to be able to identify more accessible funds to support research projects, particularly funding for early career researchers or atypical projects. We are already planning to send a list of offers to other researchers on specific topics.”