Sadly 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

Sadly 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).