Heads up: You haven’t actually responded to the comment, so DC may not see this.
I have some experience with writing grants and have a pretty robust acceptance rate, but not in anything as technical as what you’re doing so take this with a grain of salt, but based on your comment here I’d either assume that there are serious issues with your grant proposal documents and communication during the grant process leading the process to breakdown before it began or soon after it did, or that your actual tech isn’t as far along or as promising as they’d like for the amounts you’re requesting. I obviously have no idea if the latter is true, and saying that you have initial results suggests otherwise. For the former I’d suggest getting someone who’s an actual expert in the granting environment you’re working in to take a look at your materials and let you know what they think you can do to develop it. In general, grant writing is a fairly specific and technical craft, especially when dealing with grantors that specialize in medical/technological/”hard science” grants, and grantmakers don’t have a lot of time to investigate grants so it’s not uncommon for promising but not-well written in the language of the field grants to be rejected out of hand.
The same goes for grants that are focused on things that have been tried before and failed. More importantly, grantors have limited funds and will tend to fund things in order of priority, so maybe it really just is that they have more exciting projects to fund—things that are a surer bet, things that have already been tried and tested or are further along the R&D pipeline, things that will generate immediate results, etc., and they likely won’t tell you what those are both for confidentiality and potentially legal reasons and because they don’t prefer to spend their limited time giving detailed explanations and justifications to people they’ve rejected, particularly as related to other projects they’re undertaking.
Another note: A lot of the grants I applied to were either completely unavailable to for-profit companies or very strongly preferred funding non-profit, public or academic institutions—I assume you’re checking for the former, and there may not be much you can do about the latter at this point. You say “They may consider us profit-driven, assuming that we will make a lot of money from this grant. This is not true. We are genuinely prepared to provide a full report and prove that we will not profit from this initiative.”, but there isn’t really much that granting organizations can do if you just don’t, except for maybe recuperate costs + some damages for breach of contract, but that’s a hassle that they don’t want to risk, and some find taking that risk to be against their principles in the first place.
Dear lastmistborn, I am very grateful to you for your attention and the detailed explanation of potential issues. I will certainly inform DC that I have responded to his message.
I have seen, read, and understand that what you are writing is quite common, and I realize that this often happens, especially when funds are unfamiliar with you.
Furthermore, when I worked as a junior professor at the university, I wrote grants, and these grants were typically accepted. At that time, I also submitted and successfully published in journals such as JACS and Nature. Currently, I can file patent applications and receive patents from the USPTO without the need for significant revisions (i.e., on the first attempt). Our company already holds five granted American patents. This suggests that we have reasonable scientific or commercial results and that our team can quickly grasp the rules for submitting any document and successfully adhere to them.
Of course, we attempted to have our grant applications reviewed by third-party consultants. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to do this repeatedly without results, as consultants typically charge around 10% of the grant’s value regardless of whether the application is successful. Due to this, we decided not to use their services, as it is not cost-effective for us.
The essence of our current proposal can be summarized in the following paragraph:
As a German commercial company, we are prepared to manufacture new innovative portable MRI devices (www.mr-nib.com) at cost, which amounts to €15,000 per unit if an order for 200 units is placed or €25,000 per unit if an order for 30 units is placed. We are committed to localizing the devices for the Ukrainian language and providing software updates free of charge for the next 8 years. We aim to deploy these portable MRI devices in conflict zones in Ukraine to save the lives of civilians and soldiers through early diagnosis. Why Ukraine? Partly because we have many relatives and acquaintances there, and we want to offer our assistance. Last year, we privately assisted by supplying uninterruptible power systems, and we would like to help in any way we can now.
We are also open to initiating any other similar humanitarian missions on our own.
We have reached out with this initiative to numerous Ukrainian politicians, including Mykhailo Fedorov, Rustem Umerov, and Volodymyr Klitschko. We have also contacted several politicians in the German Bundestag and approached several American military companies and organizations. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, we have submitted numerous grant applications for similar initiatives to various foundations, customizing each application to align with their objectives.
Unfortunately, discussions either reached a dead end or we received rejections. What was most unpleasant and unexpected for us is that we have never received a justified explanation for why our initiative was not supported.
As an ordinary person, I was genuinely surprised that, for example, a stored guided missile sent to Ukraine costs many times more than what we are requesting for our equipment. Even if that missile doesn’t perform as expected, it is often attributed to the incompetence of Ukrainian military personnel. Meanwhile, our initiative for rapid injury diagnosis has failed to garner even the slightest response from anyone.
Heads up: You haven’t actually responded to the comment, so DC may not see this.
I have some experience with writing grants and have a pretty robust acceptance rate, but not in anything as technical as what you’re doing so take this with a grain of salt, but based on your comment here I’d either assume that there are serious issues with your grant proposal documents and communication during the grant process leading the process to breakdown before it began or soon after it did, or that your actual tech isn’t as far along or as promising as they’d like for the amounts you’re requesting. I obviously have no idea if the latter is true, and saying that you have initial results suggests otherwise. For the former I’d suggest getting someone who’s an actual expert in the granting environment you’re working in to take a look at your materials and let you know what they think you can do to develop it. In general, grant writing is a fairly specific and technical craft, especially when dealing with grantors that specialize in medical/technological/”hard science” grants, and grantmakers don’t have a lot of time to investigate grants so it’s not uncommon for promising but not-well written in the language of the field grants to be rejected out of hand.
The same goes for grants that are focused on things that have been tried before and failed. More importantly, grantors have limited funds and will tend to fund things in order of priority, so maybe it really just is that they have more exciting projects to fund—things that are a surer bet, things that have already been tried and tested or are further along the R&D pipeline, things that will generate immediate results, etc., and they likely won’t tell you what those are both for confidentiality and potentially legal reasons and because they don’t prefer to spend their limited time giving detailed explanations and justifications to people they’ve rejected, particularly as related to other projects they’re undertaking.
Another note: A lot of the grants I applied to were either completely unavailable to for-profit companies or very strongly preferred funding non-profit, public or academic institutions—I assume you’re checking for the former, and there may not be much you can do about the latter at this point. You say “They may consider us profit-driven, assuming that we will make a lot of money from this grant. This is not true. We are genuinely prepared to provide a full report and prove that we will not profit from this initiative.”, but there isn’t really much that granting organizations can do if you just don’t, except for maybe recuperate costs + some damages for breach of contract, but that’s a hassle that they don’t want to risk, and some find taking that risk to be against their principles in the first place.
Dear lastmistborn, I am very grateful to you for your attention and the detailed explanation of potential issues. I will certainly inform DC that I have responded to his message.
I have seen, read, and understand that what you are writing is quite common, and I realize that this often happens, especially when funds are unfamiliar with you.
Furthermore, when I worked as a junior professor at the university, I wrote grants, and these grants were typically accepted. At that time, I also submitted and successfully published in journals such as JACS and Nature. Currently, I can file patent applications and receive patents from the USPTO without the need for significant revisions (i.e., on the first attempt). Our company already holds five granted American patents. This suggests that we have reasonable scientific or commercial results and that our team can quickly grasp the rules for submitting any document and successfully adhere to them.
Of course, we attempted to have our grant applications reviewed by third-party consultants. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to do this repeatedly without results, as consultants typically charge around 10% of the grant’s value regardless of whether the application is successful. Due to this, we decided not to use their services, as it is not cost-effective for us.
The essence of our current proposal can be summarized in the following paragraph:
As a German commercial company, we are prepared to manufacture new innovative portable MRI devices (www.mr-nib.com) at cost, which amounts to €15,000 per unit if an order for 200 units is placed or €25,000 per unit if an order for 30 units is placed. We are committed to localizing the devices for the Ukrainian language and providing software updates free of charge for the next 8 years. We aim to deploy these portable MRI devices in conflict zones in Ukraine to save the lives of civilians and soldiers through early diagnosis. Why Ukraine? Partly because we have many relatives and acquaintances there, and we want to offer our assistance. Last year, we privately assisted by supplying uninterruptible power systems, and we would like to help in any way we can now.
We are also open to initiating any other similar humanitarian missions on our own.
We have reached out with this initiative to numerous Ukrainian politicians, including Mykhailo Fedorov, Rustem Umerov, and Volodymyr Klitschko. We have also contacted several politicians in the German Bundestag and approached several American military companies and organizations. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, we have submitted numerous grant applications for similar initiatives to various foundations, customizing each application to align with their objectives.
Unfortunately, discussions either reached a dead end or we received rejections. What was most unpleasant and unexpected for us is that we have never received a justified explanation for why our initiative was not supported.
As an ordinary person, I was genuinely surprised that, for example, a stored guided missile sent to Ukraine costs many times more than what we are requesting for our equipment. Even if that missile doesn’t perform as expected, it is often attributed to the incompetence of Ukrainian military personnel. Meanwhile, our initiative for rapid injury diagnosis has failed to garner even the slightest response from anyone.