Personally I wouldn't call it corruption, at least not all of it. If you were to drill down into the individual grants, you would find a lot of things that are

Personally I wouldn't call it corruption, at least not all of it. If you were to drill down into the individual grants, you would find a lot of things that are broadly useful but not revolutionary. There's 4M euros to produce a new additive for beeswax and 500k euros to research migratory snails and 6M euros to study some new roads and that sort of thing. There's certainly obvious corruption too, but it isn't the majority of grant money. Most stuff is just very boring and vaguely useful. I think a more useful description: it is an ossified structure where you have to play by the rules. Much like, say, the Catholic Church. You're not going to get a grant for your startup, or become Archbishop of Salzburg, by having an idea and sending some emails. You're going to have to fully commit yourself to the institution over a period of decades, and then you're in, and you're respected, and you can do some things, as long as they're not too revolutionary. Is that good for innovation? No. But corruption? I think it's something else.