While a pure lottery is often met with criticism, applicants were quite satisfied with this new mechanism of combining lottery and peer review, with about half of them favoring the lottery-first over the conventional approach.

Additionally, estimated overall costs for distributing the 50 million € where lower than 5 million €, while a conventional approach with a single peer review-step would have cost more than 13 million €.

Using data from the Freiraum-funding line of the German Foundation for innovation in higher education (stiftung-hochschullehre.de/en/) we now find evidence for that: An increased share in female applicants and grant awardees compared to a previously used procedure.