Annual reporting guide · National Science Foundation program

EPIIC annual reporting: what the report needs and where the time goes

Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity

An EPIIC award is judged on whether the institution can now do something it could not do before, more than on publications. That is hard to show in a table.

What reviewers look for

The organizational capacity story: the new infrastructure, processes and partnerships the award has made possible.

The sections that cost the most time

Capacity built: A new process has no Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The evidence is partnerships signed, staff hired, processes set up and services now offered, and none of it goes into a system by default.
Partnership formation and depth: The report needs the history of each partnership as well as a list: who was approached, what came of it, and what the partnership now produces. Most of that history is in email.
Institutional adoption: Whether the rest of the institution uses what the award built. Evidence of use must be planned from the start, or it will not exist later.
Sustainability beyond the award: Reviewers want to know what continues when the funding ends, which means tracking commitments made by the institution as well as by the project.

What an EPIIC is

EPIIC awards build innovation capacity at institutions that do not have it yet. The goal is that an institution which could not run industry partnerships, technology transfer or translational programs before can now do so, and will continue after the award ends.

What the annual report asks for

The sections are familiar, but the emphasis moves. Publications and research products matter less. Partnerships, processes, institutional adoption and sustainability carry the report.

Reviewers read for progress across the life of the award, so each year's report is partly a comparison with the last one. That makes the history part of this year's report.

Where the time goes

Most of the history was never written down, so it must be rebuilt from email.

Research output leaves a record on its own. Journals, DOIs, indexes and citation databases track a paper whether or not anyone is paying attention. Capacity has none of that. A partnership starts with a conversation, becomes an agreement, and produces something eighteen months later. Unless somebody recorded each step at the time, the year-three report has to rebuild the sequence from inboxes.

The same is true of adoption. If nobody tracked who uses the new capability, the report can offer only an anecdote.

How SimplyScholar helps

A capacity award is reported as progress over time, and a system that holds only the current state cannot show that.

We built nsf-epiic.org, the EPIIC program website, and the EPIIC Assistant, a proposal advisor for the program. We have built National Science Foundation program websites since 2016.

In SimplyScholar, our software for research centers, records carry dates. People have roles with start and end dates, so the year-three report can show how the team changed over time. Publications are imported from CrossRef by DOI and matched to your researchers, and projects and outreach are kept in the same record. The public website is built from those records.

EPIIC is the hardest program on this list to report on, because capacity leaves no citation trail. Starting the record early helps most.

Other annual reporting guides

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