[pas]

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]

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]

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). 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-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/

And here are their current CFPs: 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/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").

[pas]

first of all many thanks for the details!

---

I have spent some time looking at this and trying to get a feel for what's going on.

so it's a CFP, as part of this amazing circular bio-economy joint venture make-it-rain for the whole tech-readiness family! [0]

the specific one that you linked is ... research and innovation, but ... it looks extremely broad.

so, okay, it's not "basic research" (much broader than, let's say, "how to get the glue out of furniture leftovers"), but then what's the money for? (shouldn't this consortium already have a ton of projects ready for evaluation?)

and of course the verbiage is thick as fuck. it's not clear for me - again as an example - that if proposals MUST look at regulation induced bottlenecks or it's an "at least one of them" situation. (also, does it mean that think-tank-style NGOs can propose to do a survey of the regulatory framework and in theory get money for that alone? -- yes, I know, I should check the Annexes, and the call-specific docs/forms [but that's only available after registration?])

...

of course there are sections that absolutely seem to be prime candidate for consultant busywork ("avoid overlaps with past, ongoing and upcoming EU funded projects, including those funded under H2020, HEU and the BBI JU and CBE JU, ... P4P ... NEB ...."... WTF!)

...

all in all, it seems that when the EU wants to do something it ought to do an OKR hierarchy. (and yes, that's exactly what's happening with this 2 billion joint this and that. the objective is circular bio everafter, and the "key results" are reuse/recycle (valorization), etc.)

great. good job EU. still, if it costs 100K to file paperwork for this, I want my money back! :D (well, no I don't want it back, I want the grant system to be reformed so it costs 10x or 100x less to file. and let's spend the rest on writing better CFPs and so on.)

[0] https://www.cbe.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-images/...