Government grants are the life’s blood of modern science, providing money to help specific questions get answered and specific problems tackled. But a new federal grant has a different goal for the state’s 17 colleges and universities: Making it easier for any of them to do almost any kind of research.

“Granting mechanics usually around some specific project – ‘I’ve got a grant where I’m going to study X.’ This is much more general than that. It’s not to study any particular thing, but to build up research capacity throughout the state, regardless of the topic,” said Dr. James Newcomb, a biology professor at New England College who is a co-principal investigator on the $8 million grant, funneled through a project called NH-LIFT.

UNH is the lead institution on the project.

“One of the main takeaways from this award is to try and bring more two- and four-year institutions into research, to provide more opportunities for their students and their faculty to have research experiences, which hopefully will translate for these students into jobs within the state,” said Mark Milutinovich, director for Research and Large Center Development at UNH.

Not just colleges, however.

“We also see a lot of tangible connections to small and medium-sized businesses in the state, who have some of the same struggles,” Milutinovich said. These include uncertainty about the complexity of federal grants, accessing equipment and finding collaborators outside their business.

“This is very much at the early stages. Some of it is going to be an experiment, getting institutions to work together that have historically competed instead of collaborated,” he said. “The state is trying to retain talent, to keep students here. We’re not going to do that by trying to solve those problems individually.”

New Hampshire was one of just three states awarded the $8 million grants, along with South Dakota and Maine. The grants are part of NSF efforts to raise the nation’s research capabilities outside of academic powerhouse locations like Boston, San Francisco and Austin, with the secondary goal of helping those locations hold onto skilled workers.

Aside from NEC, collaborating institutions in New Hampshire include Keene State College, Dartmouth College, Plymouth State University, Saint Anselm College and the Community College System, which includes NHTI in Concord.

The National Institutes of Health has a similar grant program called IMBRE that targets biomedical research, with Dartmouth College as the lead institution. As a result, the NH-LIFT program will avoid biomedical research.

New England College will receive $40,000 each year from the grant. Most of that money will support the college’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program and let NEC hire more student researchers and fund specific research programs.

NH-LIFT is one of those awkward titles created to spell out a word: It stands for New Hampshire Long-term Investment to Fuel Transformative research, with “research” tacked on the end even though it’s not part of the acronym.

The grants come from NSF programs with even more awkward titles: the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Collaborations for Optimizing Research Ecosystems Research Infrastructure Improvement Program (E-CORE RII).