The whole EU grant process it’s a giant mess. I’ve seen job postings for developers where the most important required skill was knowing the grant process and ho

The whole EU grant process it’s a giant mess. I’ve seen job postings for developers where the most important required skill was knowing the grant process and how to write successful proposals (which is an art form itself). This has provided a specially perverse incentive for people that are involved in both academia and politics. I know of a certain emeritus professor that was particularly involved in national politics (spain did not have that many engineers 60 years ago), his engineering skills are average at best, since he has spent his whole life working the politics of academia. That said, he had so many titles and awards that just his qualifications earned the company he created a lot of points towards getting substantial grants. The startup has been getting >1M€/year since 2014 from the EU, plus indirect investment from private firms that can claim special benefits. All money they get they “invest” into getting stuff like patents, that allow them to claim IP with made up value. They actually have a patent for a robot architecture for which there’s no analytic solution to inverse kinematics, meaning that instead of having a trigonometric formula for computing the position of the robot, we had to do an exhaustive search simulating the position of the robot in 3d space until we were close enough.