It's significantly more convoluted for European Commision-funded projects. Having worked on a number of proposals, the process goes something like this: You pu

It's significantly more convoluted for European Commision-funded projects. Having worked on a number of proposals, the process goes something like this: You put together a consortium, with partners from at least three different European countries (seven for some proposals). If you are applying for "Future and Emerging Technologies", you write a 5 page proposal saying what you want to do, how much it will cost, how you plan to do it and why it should be done. Wait three months for the EC to respond. If they like your idea, you get to the next stage. If you are applying for a specific call or your FET-open short proposal was accepted, you get to write a full proposal. This is 60-90 pages of detailed justification for why your proposal is beyond the state of the art, a detailed work plan, a justification of the concept, the specific tasks of each partner, a timeline, a budget, and what "impact" it is meant to have on Europe as a whole in terms of the objectives of the specific call. This is a rather massive, hard to distribute amount of work. During the three months after the deadline, your proposal is sent to some call-topic-specific experts as deemed by the EC. A lot of these experts are working in the same field and indirectly competing with you. They are almost all academic or bureaucratic, since industry people don't have time for this sort of stuff. Three months later, you are told how you scored, and if you scored well enough, you are put on a list. The commission goes through the list and funds projects until the budget runs out or the projects get too bad. All in all, the feedback cycle can be over a year long, and that's before you even start work on the project itself. Resubmitting an improved/modified proposal takes an incredible feat of enthusiasm across a necessarily large number of people within several institutions. The amounts distributed are in the millions of euros, so it can be worth it, but the process essentially requires the working group to be so large that a lot of efficiency is lost.