As another poster pointed out, there are plenty of billions being sloshed about. But in my experience all this does is subsidize private investment. If an inves

As another poster pointed out, there are plenty of billions being sloshed about. But in my experience all this does is subsidize private investment. If an investor knows that the money they are putting in will unlock 3:1 in public money, then there's a pretty good argument for the investor to only give you a quarter of what you actually need. What's less thought about is how much time is wasted chasing tiny check sizes from these government programs. And then the reporting requirements are insane, hour by hour break downs of work plus reports and presentations at the end. They also don't like to give out large amounts and would rather fund lots of small partial projects, wasting even more time. As far as innovation in the EU goes, the governments (yes, plural, another problem) need to get out of the way. I'm usually positive when it comes to the functioning of European governments, but this is one of the major exceptions. I argue for European federalism, but also realize that's unrealistic. One possible step in the right direction would be to have an EU wide company structure with a single set of rules that makes investment between different European countries less complicated for companies and investors. I've also thought that a high profile EU investor could force some change by making it a requrement for their portfolio companies to immediately invert ownership to a Delaware Corp. That would open them up to US capital while simultaneously pissing of a lot of the innovation people in the government.