I contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money. Software (and hardware) projects were completed, and nothing was ever done with them. We produced over 20k pages worth of paperwork (which was all mandatory if we wanted to get the money), which I'm guessing no one ever read.
Don't get me wrong, it was all developed with good intentions, but those have been known to pave the road to hell. From a personal point of view, I learnt a lot from the experience. But there are probably more efficient ways for software engineers to learn than by doing FP7 projects.
I was just a cog in the machine, perhaps someone further down the pipe got some benefit out of what we were doing. But given how the projects were managed, I doubt it.
This maps onto my experience with an Horizon2020 project. I don't want to say that it is wasted money, rather just point out that it feels like a spray&pray approach. We travelled a lot, produced a lot of excel and word documents in a very inefficient way, the outcome, despite being the project "successful", is completely useless and will never see the light as a commercial product, not even as a useful blueprint for other organizations. All in all it was a depressing experience, knowing that we were going on thanks to taxpayer money. R&D is good and I don't want to bash on these initiatives... I guess I just ended up in a project that didn't go anywhere.
> I contributed to a couple of projects that received money from FP7 (sort of the previous iteration of Horizon 2020). In a certain sense, the whole thing seemed like a huge waste of money.
I guess your mileage does indeed vary. I contributed to a subproject of a major FP7 research program, which counted with the collaboration of a major industrial manufacturing company, a state research institute, and a couple of university research groups. In the end, besides a hand full of research papers, the industrial company developed a commercial product which is being rolled out as we speak. The state research institute didn't gained much out of the deal but we did developed institutional relationships that have been fruitful since then.
What you take from a research program is proportional to the legwork you put in. I'm sure some projects aren't immediately fruitful but it's short-sighted to claim that the money is wasted, specially if you take into account that this expenditure is what makes this sort of industrial effort possible.
I'm guessing the state research institute got some funding and visibility ('dear tax payer or high-level admin that cares about public image of state research, what you paid for - our research on topic X - for Y years is now being used in industry, see?') and that's what makes/helps them run so they probably also got some things out of this.
> But isn't this typical to R&D ? that only 1 of N projects gets used for commercial purposes ?
The OP forgot to mention that one of the goals in the Horizon2020 projects is to provide incentives to create pan-european collaborations involving industrial, academic, and institutional organizations.
In short, they are aimed to bridge the gap between academia and industry, and also create synergies between multiple organizations across Europe.
For example, some programs require applicants to partner with research institutions and industrial companies of significant and arbitrary size to be able to even submit a proposal.
Thus, it's disingenuous to evaluate the success of these programs in terms of commercial products being developed out of these programs. The political goals of developing collaborations between member-states is far more important than delivering a gadget or a trinket.
Similarly, we have the Erasmus program that enable higher-education students to spend a year in a school from a member state somewhere in Europe. It's disingenuous to assume the goal of the Erasmus program is solely academic.
As someone who came from academia, now runs a commercial company, and having participated in several large consortia projects (including Horizon 2020), I find your perspective… charming.
I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made. And where you taxes really go.
I agree it's very difficult to run large-scale research projects with consortia, etc. And even worse at EU scale with public money. I'm not sure whether there's a better way to balance the admin-load against all the scamming, or to avoid 'favoring' one nation's industry or other. When you do something on processors, you'll probably have to keep the door open to all big & small European actors, right? I feel all the administrative overload is a way to avoid all kinds of political problems.
Yes, Europeans complain about bureaucracy from the EU and here about the ERC, but the moment someone comes with more 'pragmatic' processes, either you see some 10+MEUR-level abuse quite quickly, or you get some blast about bad management of the tax payers money, and calls for more oversight.
I don't have a solution, and without a united EU military/defense budget I don't see anything DARPA-like emerging. And it seems only European military budgets (still sovereign) and regional budgets (regionalism being, to me, the biggest flaw in the modern EU vision) seem spent on 'low admin we trust you let's try this just convince this panel of scientists and admins' funding. While I think it's great for labs/research funding, for product derisking and creating competitive edges for the local industry, and for SMEs and overall high tech employment, you're not going to create a semiconductor industry like this.
I've seen the results of several ERC consortia projects and am sometimes impressed with what EU-based research (academics+smb+large groups) can do with so little money (on each subject) and, yes, so much admin overhead.
> I hope you never get to experience how the sausage is made.
I appreciate your arrogance, but as you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage. Thus your complete lack of arguments, which you tried to hide with snide remarks and an unimpressive attempt to appeal to authority, were dully noted.
> you might notice by reading my comment I already have more than enough experience making said sausage.
I noticed nothing of the sort. No need to lash out – you probably meant to describe your experience but then forgot. I'd be curious to hear. I'm not psychic, and your account is anonymous.
OK, so you've had good experience with the EU bureaucracy and its "innovation funding" schemes. What was you role in them?
But not every R&D project can or should lead to a commercial product right away. I work in a big corp and sometimes the tech you invested in, even if the PoC was great and all successful, doesn't fit in any final product because of thousands of other constraints.
But I also see lots of small 'mindshare' changes thanks to those 'it can be done' projects. The important steps seem to be to first unlock the first TRLs, then find PoCs on real products to inspire (and increase TRLs) tech directors and product managers that they need to invest the next millions into an big and still uncertain shift, and to underinvest in other important parts of their products. In the case of tech push you often end up with a new shiny tech that can't be used right away. So, mostly, it's about climbing the maturity ladder, and be ready for the very small openings in the product development cycle to shoe your new tech in.
In the case of customer pull or market pull, the lead time of such projects makes it too late to ask for external help, and no research grant wants to participate in 'product development' (not their job). So the tech is usually badly implemented and leaves a sour taste.
What I see as positive: if you have a great tech idea and available resources, and great academic/labs contacts, you can get the money, with little resistance (but yes, lots of admin work) with either European or national/regional grants.
IIRC the 2014 version of SPARK was designed and developed through a French civilian R&D funding project : http://www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite/
The project was clearly a success there (although I don't know about ROI or profitability for AdaCore on this tech). Working with innovative SMBs is a great way to get funding in France and most of the projects that I've seen tend to conclude in new products... for the SMB. But the scale is low there (<4MEUR), so it also helps to accept failure ('only' 4m 'wasted'...).
Funny thing, the wiki page explicitly cites horizon2020 (which one of the GPs criticized): "The European Commission advised EU-funded research and innovation projects to adopt the scale in 2010.[1] TRLs were consequently used in 2014 in the EU Horizon 2020 program. In 2013, the TRL scale was further canonized by the ISO 16290:2013 standard.[1] A comprehensive approach and discussion of TRLs has been published by the European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO).[3] Extensive criticism of the adoption of TRL scale by the European Union was published in The Innovation Journal, stating that the "concreteness and sophistication of the TRL scale gradually diminished as its usage spread outside its original context (space programs)"."
It’s more than that in my experience, often the concept was a non starter, or the output is nothing an enterprise couldn’t do it self if so motivated, and certainly aren’t going to bother picking through the mess of some academic code base.
I know of two companies getting money. The first ones entire business model is EU funds. They “make” only the necessary burocratic documentation. They have zero intentions of producing anything. The other is large and dirty af with bribes.
If you try to compete with them for EU grants, you are going to get an investigation into your business for misspending EU funds. Because they know the right people.
