Grant Collaboration: Why Multi-PI Grants Fail at NIH and ERC

Funding agencies keep pushing team science. NIH, NSF, ERC—they all preach the gospel of grant collaboration, insisting that complex problems require multidisciplinary teams. Yet here's the awkward truth nobody mentions at those collaboration workshops: multi-PI grants consistently have lower success rates than single-investigator proposals. Whether you're applying for an NIH R01, ERC Consolidator Grant, or Horizon Europe consortium project, the statistics are brutally consistent.

Let me be clear about what's happening. It's not that grant collaboration itself is broken. The problem is what I call "collaboration theater"—the performative assembly of research teams designed to tick boxes rather than solve problems. You know exactly what I mean if you've ever been part of a hastily assembled team three days before a deadline, desperately trying to stitch together something that looks coherent. Even with a perfect proposal template, forced collaborations fail.

These numbers tell a brutal story. The ERC Synergy Grant—explicitly designed for transformative team science—succeeds less than 10% of the time. That's not a funding mechanism; it's a lottery ticket. And before you blame it on competition, consider this: these are the proposals that agencies claim they want most. The ERC Consolidator Grant shows similar patterns when teams are poorly integrated, though solo PIs typically fare better at this funding level.

The Shotgun Wedding Problem in Grant Collaboration

Most failed collaborations start the same way. A funding opportunity appears with keywords like "interdisciplinary" and "team-based approach." Suddenly, everyone's scrambling to find partners. The biologist needs a computational person. The engineer needs a clinician. The result? What reviewers instantly recognize as a shotgun wedding—investigators thrown together by circumstance rather than shared scientific vision.

I've reviewed hundreds of these proposals. You can spot them immediately. The narrative voice changes dramatically between sections—one part reads like cautious academic prose, the next like a Silicon Valley pitch deck. Technical terms shift meanings halfway through. The budget looks like three separate grants stapled together. Most telling? The leadership plan reads like it was written by someone who's never actually led a collaborative project.

But here's what kills these proposals: reviewers aren't stupid. They've seen real collaborations and fake ones. Real collaborations have history—joint publications, shared students, complementary grants that built toward this moment. Fake collaborations have what I call "LinkedIn energy"—impressive on paper but hollow underneath.

The Reviewer's Perspective on Grant Collaboration

Put yourself in the reviewer's position for a moment. You're evaluating a multi-PI grant. You're explicitly asked to assess whether the investigators have "complementary and integrated expertise" and whether their "leadership approach, governance, and organizational structure are appropriate." Those aren't suggestions—they're scored criteria.

Now you encounter a proposal where Dr. Famous appears as co-PI with 5% effort and a vague role in "providing oversight." You see a budget with no shared personnel, no joint core facilities, nothing that suggests actual integration. The leadership plan mentions "regular meetings" and "open communication" but provides zero specifics about decision-making or conflict resolution.

What would you conclude? Exactly what most reviewers conclude: this is collaboration theater, and it's heading for disaster the moment it's funded.

The Hidden Cost for Early-Career Researchers

There's a particularly cruel twist for junior investigators. Being named as PI on an NIH multiple PI grant causes you to lose your Early Stage Investigator (ESI) status at NIH. That status is gold—it comes with more favorable paylines and special consideration in review. Trading it for a supporting role on someone else's project? That's career malpractice.

Yet senior investigators keep recruiting junior colleagues as co-PIs, selling it as "elevation" or "mentorship." What they don't mention? That junior PI won't qualify for a New Innovator Award anymore. They won't get the ESI boost on their own R01. They've essentially sacrificed their early-career advantages for a slice of someone else's pie.

NIGMS finally said the quiet part loud in their July 2024 guidance, explicitly warning early-stage investigators to think twice before joining multi-PI grants. When a funding agency tells you not to apply for their money, maybe listen.

Building Authentic Grant Collaboration for NIH and ERC Success

So how do you build grant collaboration that isn't fiction? It starts long before any funding announcement. Real collaborations grow from genuine scientific need, not funding opportunities. This applies whether you're planning an NIH multiple PI R01 or assembling a Horizon Europe consortium.

The teams that succeed have what I call a "Pre-Submission Pact"—explicit agreements about everything that matters, negotiated when there's no deadline pressure. Not vague promises about "working together" but concrete decisions about who owns what, who leads what, and what happens when things go wrong. Consider these frameworks your collaboration design blueprint.

Notice what's different here? Everything is specific. Not "we'll share data" but "Lab A provides samples by month 3, Lab B returns analysis by month 6." Not "we'll publish together" but "the lab doing majority work leads authorship, all PIs are senior authors." These aren't details—they're the difference between success and chaos.

The Leadership Plan That Actually Works

NIH requires a Multiple PI Leadership Plan for NIH multiple PI grants. Most teams treat this as paperwork. Wrong. This document is your proof of concept for the entire grant collaboration. A strong leadership plan doesn't say "we'll meet regularly." It says "mandatory bi-weekly strategy meetings, rotating chair annually, documented decisions within 14 days."

The best leadership plans I've seen include something most lack: an escalation pathway for conflicts. Because conflicts will happen. Pretending otherwise is like submitting a budget without indirect costs—technically possible but practically delusional.

The Single-Voice Solution

Even with perfect planning, multi-author proposals read like multi-author proposals. The solution? Designate a lead writer—not necessarily the lead PI, but whoever writes best. Their job isn't editing; it's complete narrative control. They rewrite everything into one voice, one terminology, one story.

This means killing your darlings. That beautiful paragraph you wrote about your methodology? If it doesn't match the voice, it gets rewritten. Your preferred term for that technique? If the team chose different terminology, yours goes. This isn't about ego—it's about creating a document that reads like one mind wrote it, because that's what convincing proposals do.

Teams that resist this level of integration shouldn't be writing joint proposals. If you can't agree on terminology, how will you agree on research directions when your initial hypothesis fails?

The Uncomfortable Truth About Team Science

Here's what nobody wants to admit: most research doesn't need multiple PIs. If you can accomplish your aims by hiring a consultant or using a core facility, you don't need grant collaboration. True multi-PI projects require scientific integration so deep that removing any PI would fundamentally break the project.

Ask yourself honestly: Could your project proceed if one of your co-PIs dropped out tomorrow? If yes, you don't have a collaboration—you have a convenience. And reviewers can smell convenience from the first page.

The successful multi-PI grants I've seen share one characteristic: necessity. Not the manufactured necessity of "interdisciplinary is good" but genuine "we literally cannot do this without each other" necessity. Dr. Chen has the only CRISPR variant that works in neurons. Dr. Park has the only validated organoid model for this disease. Together, they can test something neither could approach alone. That's not collaboration theater—that's scientific synergy.

A Framework for Real Grant Collaboration

Let me give you something concrete. Before you write a single word of your next multi-PI proposal, have this conversation with your potential partners:

"What would make this collaboration worth it even if we don't get funded?"

If you can't answer that question, stop. You're about to waste months on collaboration theater. But if you have a real answer—shared data, complementary techniques, genuine intellectual synergy—then you have the foundation for something fundable.

Next, write your Team Charter before your Specific Aims. Yes, before. Because if you can't agree on how you'll work together, the science doesn't matter. Include everything: meeting frequency, decision authority, budget flexibility, authorship principles, data sharing protocols, conflict resolution steps. Make it specific enough that a stranger could run your collaboration.

Then—and only then—start writing your proposal. And when you do, make the grant collaboration visible in every section. Not just the Leadership Plan, but woven through your research strategy. "The compounds from Aim 1 (Dr. Smith) enable the imaging in Aim 2 (Dr. Johnson)." Make the integration so obvious that removing it would be like cutting the circulatory system from a body.

The Path Forward

Multi-PI grants fail because we've confused the performance of collaboration with actual collaboration. We've created elaborate theater to satisfy funding agencies instead of building genuine partnerships that advance science. This pattern holds from NIH multiple PI R01 applications to ERC Consolidator Grant submissions to Horizon Europe consortia.

The solution isn't to avoid team science. Complex problems do require diverse expertise. But that expertise needs integration, not just proximity. It needs shared vision, not just shared budgets. Most importantly, it needs trust built through time, not desperation built through deadlines.

Start your collaborations now, not when the funding opportunity appears. Build relationships through small projects before attempting large ones. Create governance structures that acknowledge conflict rather than pretending it won't happen. And please, stop sacrificing junior investigators' careers on the altar of forced collaboration.

The agencies are right that we need more team science. They're wrong that we can manufacture it through funding mechanisms. Real grant collaboration is like trust—it's earned slowly and destroyed quickly. The proposals that succeed understand this. They're not performing collaboration; they're demonstrating it. Whether you're using a grant proposal template or starting from scratch, authentic partnership matters more than perfect formatting.

Because ultimately, reviewers aren't evaluating your promises. They're evaluating your proof. And the proof isn't in your Leadership Plan or your letters of support. It's in every sentence that shows you've already done the hard work of becoming a real team.