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ITT bashing on EU without understanding it I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unr
by AlexanderDhoore 6y ago
ITT bashing on EU without understanding it
I believe the 17 signing nations are allowed to inject money into their own economy. Even if the goals are a bit unrealistic.
EDIT The 2-3 years is when the funds are allocated. Not when the results are expected.
- rapsey 6y agoBecause somehow this initiative is different from all the other ones?
- varjag 6y agoWhich other ones you mean?
- rapsey 6y agoHorizon2020 for instance
- ginko 6y agoThat's a programme providing research grants. Why do you think it's a failure?
- sgift 6y agoCan you show where Horizon2020 squandered money? Or gave any other reason to bash the EU?
- rapsey 6y agoI know of two companies getting money. The first ones entire business model is EU funds. They “make” only the necessary burocratic documentation. They have zero intentions of producing anything. The other is large and dirty af with bribes. If you try to compete with them for EU grants, you are going to get an investigation into your business for misspending EU funds. Because they know the right people.
- welterde 6y agoWould be good to name them publicly and/or perhaps have some investigative journalists of your choice poke them a bit. Doing nothing and just giving up doesn't make corruption go away.
- Shorel 6y agoAt the very least mention the countries these companies are based on.
- andi999 6y agoI thought it is not possible to have 100% funding through EU funds, there needs to be a sustainable business; but maybe ppl do not check this.
- petre 6y agoThat's one reason why the European Public Prossecutor's Office was created.
- scotty79 6y agoBetter defined goal, more money?
- varjag 6y agoThis looks a lot like what NSF does in the USA, on a similar budget.
- elric 6y agoI contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money. Software (and hardware) projects were completed, and nothing was ever done with them. We produced over 20k pages worth of paperwork (which was all mandatory if we wanted to get the money), which I'm guessing no one ever read. Don't get me wrong, it was all developed with good intentions, but those have been known to pave the road to hell. From a personal point of view, I learnt a lot from the experience. But there are probably more efficient ways for software engineers to learn than by doing FP7 projects. I was just a cog in the machine, perhaps someone further down the pipe got some benefit out of what we were doing. But given how the projects were managed, I doubt it.
- petra 6y agoBut isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N projects gets used for commercial purposes ?
- lemonspat 6y agoI read the previous comment as: there wasn’t anyone at the end trying to help make it actually commercialized
- touisteur 6y agoBut not every R&D project can or should lead to a commercial product right away. I work in a big corp and sometimes the tech you invested in, even if the PoC was great and all successful, doesn't fit in any final product because of thousands of other constraints. But I also see lots of small 'mindshare' changes thanks to those 'it can be done' projects. The important steps seem to be to first unlock the first TRLs, then find PoCs on real products to inspire (and increase TRLs) tech directors and product managers that they need to invest the next millions into an big and still uncertain shift, and to underinvest in other important parts of their products. In the case of tech push you often end up with a new shiny tech that can't be used right away. So, mostly, it's about climbing the maturity ladder, and be ready for the very small openings in the product development cycle to shoe your new tech in. In the case of customer pull or market pull, the lead time of such projects makes it too late to ask for external help, and no research grant wants to participate in 'product development' (not their job). So the tech is usually badly implemented and leaves a sour taste. What I see as positive: if you have a great tech idea and available resources, and great academic/labs contacts, you can get the money, with little resistance (but yes, lots of admin work) with either European or national/regional grants. IIRC the 2014 version of SPARK was designed and developed through a French civilian R&D funding project : http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/ http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/ The project was clearly a success there (although I don't know about ROI or profitability for AdaCore on this tech). Working with innovative SMBs is a great way to get funding in France and most of the projects that I've seen tend to conclude in new products... for the SMB. But the scale is low there (<4MEUR), so it also helps to accept failure ('only' 4m 'wasted'...).
- jcelerier 6y agoWhat ? there's a shitton of good research done on H2020 funds
- meh2frdf 6y agoAny examples?
- jcelerier 6y agoyou can check out this for a meta-analysis: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/8/6/e021864.full.pdf https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/8/6/e021864.full.pdf and then, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q="funded"+"H2020" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q="funded"+"... and add any field you'd like
- rusk 6y agoYou mean like CERN? Yeah what a waste of everybody’s time that was ...
- Eridrus 6y agoThere are a fair amount of people who think the LHC was not a wise use of resources since it did not give any clues to a new theory beyond the existing "Standard Model" https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-for-physics-20160809/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-f... It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that had to hand out work to all the funding countries. I am curious what investments have worked out for the EU, but if the LHC is the pinnacle, it doesn't inspire much hope.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThere is a missing bit of perapective: many EU startups rely on grants for bootstrapping because investors here are a lot more risk averse here. They commonly let folks get their startup to an MVP and become investable. The other factor is that they come in waves: there could be many grants for your startup for a few years, then government focus shifts and they dry up, then 5 years later they might come again Aquiring the grants and completing the required paperwork feels a lot like doing schoolwork - it's tedious, but certainly doable, I have won 2 grants a few years back for my startup, its not like you have to be a big corp to stand a chance.
- Roritharr 6y agoI won a grant for our company, roughly 600k, but it took nearly 2 years until the first money hit our bank accounts and the ongoing documentation effort is really slowing a lot of things down. But it might be because it's Germany, you have to use your regional bank for the process and ours was horrible.
- andi999 6y agoStill, I think the 2-3 years is too short. I believe if you put in a lot of money into something it needs a bit of time, otherwise every participant will just do whatever they normally do, just more of it.