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Disclaimer: I run a Brussels-based startup accelerator which, as part of its program, assists startups in these applications (just like those consultancy compan

Disclaimer: I run a Brussels-based startup accelerator which, as part of its program, assists startups in these applications (just like those consultancy companies you mention). And I completely, entirely agree with you. The process is very, very annoying, long, bureaucratic, uncertain and frustrating. It's quite transparent actually unlike GP says, but the main problem is that the scale of the complexity involved in those applications means you are going to be paying consultants to help you as part of the process. This means there's a bunch of money flowing towards pure paperwork, and often those consultants also take a success fee which reduces the total amount paid out to the project. In other words, if you have a 1MM EUR grant, on average 100-150k will be spent ... on the application process across the consortium. And this is just for the winners; given that there's a lot of entities applying to these, I wouldn't be surprised if the "application spend" reaches ~30% of the total. And while not all of it comes out of the grant budget, it's spend triggered by the grant. Cascade funding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Funding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Funding) is .. kind of better? Because it allows smaller projects to exist and apply on their own without as much hassle. The smaller calls are a LOT more competitive however so you don't escape this added work created by the grant application: Many many person-months end up being wasted on the process. But the thing with cascade funding is that every layer of funding that gets cascaded takes a % in operations, and does create additional "work" in the system: It's just spread over more entities and projects. So while it succeeds at "moving more money", a lot of the value-creation is pure busywork. TBF I don't know a single well-meaning EU civil servant that doesn't think the system needs to be reformed. But into what? How else do you distribute these huge budgets, in open, transparent and democratic way to so many people without creating these huge and complex systems, all while maintaining good checks against fraud? It's easy to say "we can do better" especially here on HN but solving this is magnitudes harder than the types of scale problems Google & Meta face, and it's cross-disciplinary not just engineering. The EU has funded really fantastic and inspiring things, we shouldn't dismiss the whole thing outright.

pas 2y ago
Can you help somehow describe, show, demonstrate what the fuck costs 100K EUR for ... paperwork? How does this work? Which EU agencies/institutions are involved, what grants are we talking about? Companies hire groups of developers based on resumes and at best a few hours of vibes. It's good that public funds are spent in a more "evidence based" manner, but it's ridiculous how inefficient this is. It should be a lottery if it's that hard to judge. It's R&D for fuck's sake. Risk is inherent in the process. If we want something with a well understood outcomey then use the usual procurement. WTF.
- waihtis 2y ago
  Its pure theft for the purpose on enriching bureaucrats and other middlemen. Spin it how you want but the source of the funds is tax money collected from EU nations.
- scrollaway 2y ago
  Most of the consultants operate on a "cost plus success fee", where the success fee is a flat % of the amount that is won. This ensures the consultant is incentivized to actually win the grant. Some will reduce their cost depending on the success fee percentage (which I've seen go as high as 15%). > Which EU agencies/institutions are involved, what grants are we talking about? If you google "horizon grant consulting", you will find a lot of examples. > It should be a lottery if it's that hard to judge. A lottery encourages a higher amount of low quality submissions. > It's R&D for fuck's sake. Well, no, not always. This system applies to the distribution of a LOT of european funds, not just R&D. It's the main way public money moves. If the EU wants to do "something", they'll create a project and do a call for interest, then a call for participation & mentors/evaluators. Mentors/evaluators get remunerated (it's always budgeted for), and will evaluate the proposals. The larger grants require consortiums of multiple members/entities from a minimum amount of different member states, represented by a consortium lead (usually a university will take this role). Pure R&D goes through the EIC programs (European Investment Council - https://eic.ec.europa.eu/index_en https://eic.ec.europa.eu/index_en). They are also abhorrently difficult, but they have an excellent reputation and I'd argue they're a lot less broken than Horizon funding. The EIC accelerator (https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-funding-opportunities/eic-accelerator_en https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-funding-opportunities/eic-accel...) is the most competitive accelerator out there; it offers 2.5M of non-dilutive funding so of course it's really interesting, and they tend to fund excellent projects with it. Horizon programs are more exploratory: The EU has an overarching goal (eg. "we want to move off fossil fuels") and will create thematics for it (eg. "bioplastics", "solar power", "hydrogen"). Those thematics get a variety of calls for more specific proposals on the project. Here's an example of one of those themes: https://www.cbe.europa.eu/ https://www.cbe.europa.eu/ And here are their current CFPs: https://www.cbe.europa.eu/open-calls-proposals https://www.cbe.europa.eu/open-calls-proposals Take one example "Valorisation of polluted/contaminated wood from industrial and post-consumer waste streams - €7 million" which is available here with the ID HORIZON-JU-CBE-2024-RIA-01: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-ju-cbe-2024-ria-01 https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... And you see that they expect projects with specific outcomes (first paragraph, eg they're expecting all projects to result in "New systems combing sorting, cleaning and valorisation of post-consumer and post-industrial wood waste into eco-designed sustainable bio-based products").
waihtis 2y ago
Worth remembering EU funding is collected from the nations that participate. In other words, our tax money is paid into the money pool, application consultants eat 10-30% of it and then it gets paid back to those who can afford to pay consultants six-figure sums at minimum. EU bureacrats can pat each other in the back for "creating inspiring and fantastic things", per your words. Altogether a fantastic system. /s
- scrollaway 2y ago
  Sounds to me like you just have an axe to grind and don’t really know what you’re talking about; just a strong desire to complain. It’s not how solutions get built. But I say this from a bed of privilege — it’s true that I have a much better shot at fixing this system than most people in Europe, due to living in brussels. I’m working on it. We can only do so much.
  - waihtis 2y ago
    Feel free to refute anything I said instead of going into ad hominems.
    - scrollaway 2y ago
      It's not ad hominem; it's a fact: You sound like you just have an axe to grind and you're not adding much to the discussion beyond large scale vague complaints nobody can do anything about. I'm not sure how the onus is on me to refute anything beyond that. I've added plenty to the discussion upthread.
      - waihtis 2y ago
        My critique is having a largely inefficient middleman (EU) in distributing funds, and that it would likely be much more effective and transparent to have, say, business grants handled by the local governments. You did not address this at all, rather talked about some alternative EU-centric funding models. The fact that you are not even considering that dismantling some of the inefficient central planning could help is rather concerning, but perhaps such is the way of life in Brussels. In that case I only wish you enjoy it while it lasts, since the EU is very rapidly becoming a largely obsolete player in the global economy.

pas 2y ago

Can you help somehow describe, show, demonstrate what the fuck costs 100K EUR for ... paperwork? How does this work? Which EU agencies/institutions are involved, what grants are we talking about? Companies hire groups of developers based on resumes and at best a few hours of vibes. It's good that public funds are spent in a more "evidence based" manner, but it's ridiculous how inefficient this is. It should be a lottery if it's that hard to judge. It's R&D for fuck's sake. Risk is inherent in the process. If we want something with a well understood outcomey then use the usual procurement. WTF.

waihtis 2y ago
Its pure theft for the purpose on enriching bureaucrats and other middlemen. Spin it how you want but the source of the funds is tax money collected from EU nations.
scrollaway 2y ago
Most of the consultants operate on a "cost plus success fee", where the success fee is a flat % of the amount that is won. This ensures the consultant is incentivized to actually win the grant. Some will reduce their cost depending on the success fee percentage (which I've seen go as high as 15%). > Which EU agencies/institutions are involved, what grants are we talking about? If you google "horizon grant consulting", you will find a lot of examples. > It should be a lottery if it's that hard to judge. A lottery encourages a higher amount of low quality submissions. > It's R&D for fuck's sake. Well, no, not always. This system applies to the distribution of a LOT of european funds, not just R&D. It's the main way public money moves. If the EU wants to do "something", they'll create a project and do a call for interest, then a call for participation & mentors/evaluators. Mentors/evaluators get remunerated (it's always budgeted for), and will evaluate the proposals. The larger grants require consortiums of multiple members/entities from a minimum amount of different member states, represented by a consortium lead (usually a university will take this role). Pure R&D goes through the EIC programs (European Investment Council - https://eic.ec.europa.eu/index_en https://eic.ec.europa.eu/index_en). They are also abhorrently difficult, but they have an excellent reputation and I'd argue they're a lot less broken than Horizon funding. The EIC accelerator (https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-funding-opportunities/eic-accelerator_en https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-funding-opportunities/eic-accel...) is the most competitive accelerator out there; it offers 2.5M of non-dilutive funding so of course it's really interesting, and they tend to fund excellent projects with it. Horizon programs are more exploratory: The EU has an overarching goal (eg. "we want to move off fossil fuels") and will create thematics for it (eg. "bioplastics", "solar power", "hydrogen"). Those thematics get a variety of calls for more specific proposals on the project. Here's an example of one of those themes: https://www.cbe.europa.eu/ https://www.cbe.europa.eu/ And here are their current CFPs: https://www.cbe.europa.eu/open-calls-proposals https://www.cbe.europa.eu/open-calls-proposals Take one example "Valorisation of polluted/contaminated wood from industrial and post-consumer waste streams - €7 million" which is available here with the ID HORIZON-JU-CBE-2024-RIA-01: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-ju-cbe-2024-ria-01 https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port... And you see that they expect projects with specific outcomes (first paragraph, eg they're expecting all projects to result in "New systems combing sorting, cleaning and valorisation of post-consumer and post-industrial wood waste into eco-designed sustainable bio-based products").

waihtis 2y ago

Worth remembering EU funding is collected from the nations that participate. In other words, our tax money is paid into the money pool, application consultants eat 10-30% of it and then it gets paid back to those who can afford to pay consultants six-figure sums at minimum. EU bureacrats can pat each other in the back for "creating inspiring and fantastic things", per your words. Altogether a fantastic system. /s

scrollaway 2y ago
Sounds to me like you just have an axe to grind and don’t really know what you’re talking about; just a strong desire to complain. It’s not how solutions get built. But I say this from a bed of privilege — it’s true that I have a much better shot at fixing this system than most people in Europe, due to living in brussels. I’m working on it. We can only do so much.
- waihtis 2y ago
  Feel free to refute anything I said instead of going into ad hominems.
  - scrollaway 2y ago
    It's not ad hominem; it's a fact: You sound like you just have an axe to grind and you're not adding much to the discussion beyond large scale vague complaints nobody can do anything about. I'm not sure how the onus is on me to refute anything beyond that. I've added plenty to the discussion upthread.
    - waihtis 2y ago
      My critique is having a largely inefficient middleman (EU) in distributing funds, and that it would likely be much more effective and transparent to have, say, business grants handled by the local governments. You did not address this at all, rather talked about some alternative EU-centric funding models. The fact that you are not even considering that dismantling some of the inefficient central planning could help is rather concerning, but perhaps such is the way of life in Brussels. In that case I only wish you enjoy it while it lasts, since the EU is very rapidly becoming a largely obsolete player in the global economy.