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How about the following scheme: 1. A government, any government, puts aside about €500 million. 2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent
by akie 5y ago
How about the following scheme:
1. A government, any government, puts aside about €500 million.
2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas.
3. If ANY measurable progress has been made once the money runs out, your group gets another €500k. Expect 50% of the companies of step 2 to fail. Total budget for this phase is again €50 million, for (now) 100 ideas.
4. If the money from 2. or 3. turns out to be spent maliciously, the government will haunt you to get you to pay it back (there are existing protocols in place to deal with this).
5. If the money from 3. runs out, there is a go/no-go decision. In case of "go", you get €2 to €5 million to really have a go at it and build the real thing. In case of "no go", it stops here. You are obviously free to take your idea and try to find other investors for it. Weeds out (say) 50%, so now left at 50 ideas - total budget about €175 million.
6. For the companies that get the "go" in step 5, observe their performance. If it's promising, give them another €10 million. Again you probably only fund 50%, so that's 25 ideas for about €250 million.
7. Profit.
Tada, a working process that probably gets your country a fairly large number of actually competitive companies that can end up employing thousands of people and at the same time help save the planet.
Germany could run a competition like this for €6 per person. The EU could fund it for €1 per person. Heck, even the city of New York could fund it for the low, low, price of €20 per person. This is eminently doable.
- capital_guy 5y agoThis is called DARPA in the US.
- akie 5y agoThere you go! We can call it CARPA (Climate Advanced Research Projects Agency) to help sell it.
- jseliger 5y ago2. Anyone who can submit a proposal, and anyone with a decent enough plan and a convincing group of people to execute it gets €250k. Total budget for this phase is €50 million, so this funds 200 ideas. This is basically ARPA-E: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/faqs/general-questions https://arpa-e.energy.gov/faqs/general-questions. I've written a bunch of these, and they're more straightforward than many federal applications.
- janj 5y agoThere are some programs like this. My town just one $1m to tackle climate change. I had a very small part in the proposal process, it was exciting to see the news yesterday. https://www.petaluma360.com/article/news/petaluma-earns-1m-grant-to-tackle-climate-change-solutions/ https://www.petaluma360.com/article/news/petaluma-earns-1m-g...
- 293849283 5y agoThis is already done in Europe in the form of EU and country-specific research/development grants (e.g. ANR in France, BMBF in Germany). While in theory it sounds amazing, in practice it is a very poor way of making progress from my own personal experience. The applicants form a consortium, usually a heavy hitter followed by some universities and smaller firms. They usually promise something that they are already working on in the context of a thematic package that the ministry puts up for grabs. The research is usually done by the university, while the large company moves the money around citing 'management' workloads. The small companies don't really do much, or present past results as cutting edge R&D. To your number 4, you forget that all systems involve people, and in the small world model everybody in the industry kind of knows each other. It's very easy to wine&dine, then show some fancy demos to scruffy suits in Brussels and get away with doing absolutely nothing at all. In my personal opinion this is more or less a consequence of all innovative and intelligent people going to work at FAANG for ads and whatnot, the rest of them being locked in the politics of academia.
- janekm 5y agoSadly your experience matches some of my own (in particular there are companies which purely exist to take part in these funding programmes which is a bit of a perversion of the aims). There are some great exceptions, and it's unfortunately really hard to design the right balance of admin overhead to programme effectiveness (intuitively I suspect many smaller companies / startups / research groups that could potentially create great work are put off by the admin overhead).
- wussboy 5y agoThis is what the billionaires should be doing with their money.
- janekm 5y agoThat's not too far off from how EU funding programmes work (slightly different structure to the funding rounds but similar idea). LIFE which is one of the current programmes targeting climate change has a current budget of €5.43 billion: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-funding-programmes/programme-environment-and-climate-action-life_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-fu...