• Question: do you ever find you are short of funding? if so what do you do?

    Asked by daviesl3 to Amit, Emily, Joanne, Martin, Paige on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Martin Wallace

      Martin Wallace answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      In my industry being short of funds would be where people hadn’t bought any of our products for a long time. This might mean that the company didn’t have enough money to pay the employees. Unfortunately in this situation it may be necessary to make some people redundant, meaning they would lose their jobs. This isn’t the same as being fired because the person hasn’t done anything wrong, but if the company didn;t do this, then it would keep losing money until everyone would have to lose their jobs.
      The way businesses can stop this happening is to be very aware of how much money the company is making and what products they need to work on in order to stay in business. There are lots of people in an engineering business who don’t have an engineering background – people with experience in finance and marketing for example. It is these people who help to keep the company in business while the engineers work on the technical side.

    • Photo: Emily Bullen

      Emily Bullen answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      The financial pressures on all industries at the moment mean that we are probably all faced with money constraints. You might have heard that a lot of drugs are going off patent soon. This means that the company that invented the drug won’t make any more money from it as it can be sold much cheaper by someone else. (let us know if you’re interested in more about that)
      That means that at the moment we have to be quite convincing before we are given money for things. We tend to build a “business case” basically explaining to the people who distribute the money what we are trying to do, why, and what the benefits will be.

    • Photo: Joanne Davies

      Joanne Davies answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      I have never applied for any sort of funding.

    • Photo: Paige Brown

      Paige Brown answered on 17 Mar 2012:

      I have not really been short of funding, except in my own communications endeavors. I wish I had more funds to create opportunities for young students to interact with engineers and scientists in their communities or online 😉

    • Photo: Amit Pujari

      Amit Pujari answered on 18 Mar 2012:

      Luckily I have not been short of funding until now.

      But as government is reducing the amount of money it distributes, it is becoming more and more difficult to get funding (for university research, this is what I do!).

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