[throwaway098237]

I work in EU research funding programs. The process is very bureaucratic, making it difficult for any small company to apply. Not to mention projects without a company.

It's also quite ineffective at giving money to the projects that are meaningful.

Large companies and large university projects rake in plenty.

[secfirstmd]

Yeh so true. One of fhe great things about the Open Tech Fund was that it makes it easier for people with open source ideas, like Signal or our own Umbrella security training app, to get funding. Doing that through European funds would be impossible.

[pabs3]

NLnet uses EU funds to help open source projects, in a similar way to OTF:

https://nlnet.nl/

[oever]

Not just EU funds, but those are currently the largest funds at NLnet.

NLnet does 'funding as a service'. If you want to fund a particular area of FOSS, we (I work there) can administer that. We provide low overhead funding to FOSS projects and pay particular attention to how the ecosystem benefits from projects.

So 'boring' projects that improve adherence to standards, increase deployments of standards compliant software, test standards compliance are very welcome. Redecentralizing the web requires this work, but few people think that this work is fundable. It is and in our opinion is has a high ROI for society.

[pabs3]

I have found that NLnet's funding is very competitive and pretty hard to get.

[setbackreset]

NLnet seems to have been doing the good fund for quite some time!

[PeterStuer]

Can confirm, though I need to qualify that most of my experience is in the software related programs.

In each and every framework so far, the EU is touting 'reduced administrative overhead', 'simplification of participation' and 'focus on SME's', but has in practice done exactly the opposite.

Especially since Horizon 2020, there has been a 'coup' by the large enterprise and large academic research groups. You can see the same trends in national programs as well.

[ornornor]

I hope it won’t become like Canada’s SRED credits where the consultant that helps you make it look like you’re eligible costs 1/3 of the credits you get. These credits in turn keep otherwise completely unprofitable and doomed startups funded while the product delivers no value whatsoever. It’s borderline a scam and the program’s spirit has been completely abused by now.

[g_p]

This is another real issue I've seen in some places, especially regions that are trying to "do" tech, but where it doesn't come naturally.

It hurts me to watch systems full of broken incentives emerge and have money thrown into them repeatedly - there's "tech startups" (which would be laughed out of the valley due to their head-count and lack of any product market fit) receiving large ongoing subsidies to their payrolls while they slowly pretend to iterate on a product, all because they have "created" an agreed number of jobs, and need to keep those chairs full.

Europe on the whole doesn't have a culture of taking the same level of risks with capital, and there's a real push to fund things that are "safe" and help cover up weaknesses in the market - funding a company to hire people into basic tech roles at below-market pay helps to reduce graduate unemployment, which covers up the fact their education isn't giving them the right skills. That's pleasing to government.

On the other hand, giving 1m EUR to a small company with low head-count but a great idea could be a game-changer, and lead to far greater longer-term gains, but any government funding like this would be accompanied by so much red tape that you'd spend half of the 1m EUR on satisfying the monitoring requirements of the grant, attending monthly external progress review meetings, defending your progress to agreed (and inflexible) milestones etc.

That last point is perhaps the killer for innovation - most of the innovation funding schemes I've seen require detailed project plans before receive a cent of funding, and then hold you rigorously to that plan. Need to pivot? Welcome to the multi-page "change request form", which must be approved by a panel of non-technical bureaucrats before you can dare to change direction. They'll get back to you within 3 months, until which time you should continue with your original plan, as you will still be judged by your previous milestone payment plan. Your idea not working? That's not an acceptable outcome - you simply must deliver what you said! Failure is not welcome, you must deliver exactly what you said, else they will complain you are causing them to under-spend by the end of the financial year (as they now won't pay you!)...

[g_p]

Part of the problem with the process is that, for various well-intentioned reasons, there's a major focus placed on delivering objective evaluation on any kind of funded research or work. Bureaucrats want to demonstrate the impact their funding had, so that next time around (in say 5 or 6 years) they can make the case for the same amount of money (or indeed more). This leads to a system where "safe pairs of hands" are favoured, due to their ability to "play the game" and deliver the right kinds of metrics. A larger organisation can deliver "more jobs created" as they have the operating capital in place to run hiring using the research funding money, and commit up-front to "creating" those jobs (which they would have needed anyway, but can now fund, in part or in whole, through the funded project).

That's why, in my view, the bigger companies and universities do well - they have a scale that helps them to deliver these kinds of outputs. As a small company, the "spend-and-claim-back" approach to most research funding can be a real issue, especially if the claims are delayed due to bureaucratic "checks and balances". These are necessary to prevent blatant outright fraud (i.e. people not doing the work they say they did, and pocketing the cash), but they tend to be applied across the board, rather than in a targeted way proprortional to the level of risk, and size of the organisation. The end result is smaller players spend more time (proportionately) handling bureaucracy if they do win funding.

RE selecting meaningful projects, this is arguably because EU research funding looks further ahead, at lower technology readiness levels. An open source project used by everyone is "high TRL" and therefore hard to fund. If they have an entity (as you point out, many don't, which makes them harder to fund),

If you don't have a company to pay yourself through an official payroll system, I believe there are rules in place which effectively define that you work a maximum of 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, and that you can't possibly earn more than 25 EUR per hour, which is of course completely out of line with the sector, and makes it really hard to work without creating a company. At which point you then become subject to state aid rules, and need to keep a handle on that.

And beyond the research programmes, any kind of "innovation funding" then drags you into the state aid system of partial funding, which is very difficult for a small company - getting 60% of full payroll costs funded sounds nice, but it requires you have the cashflow/capital in place to run payments through payroll, in order to claim back a percentage. Not ideal for the kinds of non-commercial "critical internet infrastructure" that need this kind of funding the most.