Exercises — Chapter 23: Collaborative and Multi-Institutional Proposals

Work these with a real or planned project that could involve a team. Even if your work is single-PI, do Parts A and M — you will likely join others' teams, and understanding subawards, leadership plans, and the one-voice discipline makes you a far better collaborator.

How to use these: Part A checks recall; Part B applies the chapter to concrete team-building decisions; Part C asks you to create at a real team-builder's level (a leadership plan, a subaward sketch); Part M interleaves earlier chapters. Answers to selected exercises (★) are in the back matter.

Part A — Recall and Understand

A1. ★ State the chapter's threshold concept in your own words. What do reviewers most want to be convinced of in a collaborative proposal, beyond the science and the people?

A2. Give the test every potential collaborator should pass before joining a team.

A3. Name three leadership models for collaborative proposals and when each fits.

A4. ★ What is a leadership and coordination plan, and what five things should it address?

A5. Define: subaward, prime / lead institution, multiple-PI (MPI), contact PI, letter of commitment, core / component.

A6. How do indirect costs work across a multi-institution budget, and why are there multiple indirect rates?

A7. Why must a multi-author proposal speak with "one voice," and who is responsible for making it do so?

Part B — Apply

B1. ★ Necessary or dead weight? For each potential partner, decide whether they belong and why: - (a) A second clinical site that doubles recruitment and reaches a different patient population. - (b) A famous investigator added because their name might impress reviewers, with no distinct role. - (c) A community organization that holds the relationships needed to enroll a hard-to-reach population. - (d) A partner institution doing work the lead institution could easily do itself.

B2. Choose the model. For each, recommend single-PI-with-subawards, MPI, or center/consortium, and justify: - (a) A project clearly led by one investigator, with two sites contributing recruitment. - (b) A project genuinely co-led by two investigators integrating two equal domains. - (c) A large multi-component effort with shared cores and several distinct sub-projects.

B3. ★ Fix the leadership plan. Rewrite this into a credible one: "The PIs will communicate regularly and resolve any issues collegially and by consensus." Add governance, conflict resolution, and an evidence element.

B4. Budget the subaward. A lead university (indirect rate A) has two subaward partners (rates B and C). Describe, in words, how the indirect costs are computed across the three institutions, and the common mistake to avoid.

B5. The timeline trap. You decide three weeks before the deadline to make a proposal collaborative with two new institutional partners. What's the risk, and what should you do immediately?

Part C — Analyze and Create

C1. ★ Write a leadership and coordination plan. For your (real or planned) team project, draft a one-page plan: governance and decision-making, roles and responsibilities, communication and coordination, conflict resolution, and the evidence your team has worked together. Use the Section 23.3 model. This goes in your "My Proposal" document.

C2. Justify the team. For each partner in your project, write the one-sentence necessary-complementary-capability justification. Cut any partner you can't justify crisply.

C3. ★ Sketch the subaward structure. For your project, list who gets a subaward, for what scope of work, and the documentation each needs (budget, justification, scope, signed commitment) — and lay out the earlier timeline you'll follow to gather it all.

C4. The credit conversation. Write the agenda for the candid pre-submission conversation about roles, leadership, credit, and budget that Section 23.5 recommends. What questions must be settled before submitting, and why?

C5. One-voice integration. Take two short sections written in clearly different styles (yours and a colleague's, or two you write deliberately differently) and integrate them into one coherent voice. Note what you changed and why a reviewer would prefer the result.

Part M — Mixed and Interleaved Review

M1. ★ (Ch 22 + 23) A collaborative proposal is declined because "the team seemed disjointed." Apply the resubmission skill: what does this critique signal, and what specifically would you strengthen?

M2. (Ch 13 + 23) How does Chapter 13's capacity and letter-of-commitment craft extend to a multi-institution team and its subaward partners?

M3. ★ (Ch 11 + 23) Walk through how indirect (F&A) costs work in a layered, multi-institution budget, and why the prime applies its rate only to a limited portion of each subaward.

M4. (Ch 5 + 23) Connect Chapter 5's "one argument" coherence to the one-voice discipline for multi-author proposals. Why does a coherent proposal signal a coordinated team?

M5. (Ch 21 + 23) How is an international consortium (Chapter 21) a collaborative proposal "with borders added"? Which elements of this chapter intensify in the international case?

M6. (Ch 4 + 23) Chapter 4 taught that the most preventable failure is starting too late. Why does that lesson multiply for multi-institution proposals?

🪞 Metacognitive check-in. Notice whether you're tempted to add impressive names to a team to strengthen a proposal. That instinct — roster-building over team-building — is exactly what this chapter warns against. Reviewers fund working teams, not glittering lists. The harder, more valuable discipline is to build the leanest team the work genuinely requires, justify every member, and then prove the collaboration is real. If you can resist the prestige reflex, you'll build teams that both win funding and actually function.