Comment by menaerus
18 days ago
I largely see this type of collaboration as a very inefficient form of a distributed company (team) where members of that team do not have other incentive but to (mostly) collect points on research papers. There is no incentive to actually build a product in such a setting and there is no incentive to remain competitive since you cannot be fired, or penalized in some other form. And generally speaking, as an individual you don't care about the industry (market) competition since you mostly care about remaining relevant within your very narrow scope of your research topic. So, this is why this doesn't work. There is no coherent mass toward the same goal. Seemingly there is but there isn't.
This is a Horizon grant, meaning:
IOW, these kinds of projects are not parades for free money. You have to put considerable effort and brainpower to write the proposal, get selected and get the grant, and then you have to realize what you have written in your project to get that money.
I'm in many European projects of this kind for close to two decades. These projects do not result in papers. They result in deliverables (documents and what you are intending to build), and they deliver. While I can't go into details, the atmosphere is never an "academic" one, but it's connected to real world. We sometimes work with commercial entities to improve their know-how and abilities, too. Many of the projects have commercial partners which commercialize these technologies, esp in earth/ecosystem observation.
Sometimes we support them for free, because they need to do the research to be able to show what they are doing for an initial grant. It's not about money, fame, having a corner office with free flowing grant money or travel.
People do this to improve the world around them and make an impact, and we don't fight over wins. We drink coffee and work hard to deliver what we promised.
Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.
> IOW, these kinds of projects are not parades for free money.
No, they are subsidies for uncompetitive R&D teams. They are spectacularly inefficient, for all the reasons you mention. Teams specialise in Horizon funding, not actual progress.
> Lastly, I don't get the grant money. It's just deposited to institution account. I have no monetary or material gain from this.
Aha, so your team is funded by Horizon. What's the old saying about people and understanding where their paycheques come from?
"Yeah uh you don't understand how this works. I don't have the time to tell you why, just believe me, it works. Oh also they give us money."
I'm not entirely convinced...
6 replies →
I am familiar with Horizon and EU grant funds and how these projects are managed - basically a big waste of time and money without concrete results with plenty of bureaucracy crawling the project ideas and resources to the halt. I am not saying that because I think people are not hard working, I am just saying that the process as it is is not fit to produce something (market) competitive. Process is there to serve its own purpose.
You mention deliverables as document specs? Those are not the deliverables. The deliverables are products that gain traction and see success on the market or research topics that gain traction in the academia because of their groundbreaking methods. That in sufficiently short period of time because otherwise you cannot remain competetive. Leaving "commercialization" on the table while we figure out something is also what is wrong with the system. The world does not wait for EU to commercialize the idea that has been put into a document 5 years ago.
I can give concrete examples of many large EU companies and institutions, because they are just that and they have a lot of power, getting millions of EURs just to produce BIG nothing. Innovation is not at the heart of these projects. Mostly subpar engineers with no deep science research.
Can you list me few examples of successful projects you have in mind? Why, for example, Mistral AI isn't among them?
>Can you list me few examples of successful projects you have in mind? Why, for example, Mistral AI isn't among them?
Yeah, I was surprised too. I would expect Mistral to jump on the band wagon if only to get some easy EU funding.
"They result in deliverables"
I had a _so_ different experience after being involved in two of them...
> There is no incentive to actually build a product in such a setting and there is no incentive to remain competitive since you cannot be fired, or penalized in some other form
That sounds horrible and stressful to be honest.
I won't disagree but it's the most effective way of getting an edge over the competition. Without the "reward and punishment" system in place, how else do you get that extra mile from your engineers? How else do you find an incentive to reduce the fat in the management structure? USA companies know how to do this very well and you cannot remain competitive unless you're willing to do the same or find some other similar system.
You mean a good environment for doing R&D?
Yes, we do a great deal of R&D, too. It looks boring from outside, but it enables things for us and researchers. Oh, and we give the patches back to the tools we use.