Comment by badlogic
18 days ago
As someone who has lived through Eurostar and Horizon 2020, and who has participated as both a researcher and corporate partner, I can say: it does not work.
Unless by work you mean "successfully passed the post-project review by non-experts based on a bunch of slides"
Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.
I once registered as an "expert" on those EU related websites in the hope to be invited to an event where I could network.
Next thing I know one of those Horizon 2020 project send me 20 proposals to evaluate and select by next week. Each of them was 50-100 pages long, mostly BS.
I couldn't really do any real due diligence and I don't believe anybody did any on me. So just create register fake domain names to get a fake corporate email addresses, create a fake LinkedIn profiles and you can have a significant weight in the selection process for grants. It is that simple.
I remember it made me feel sick in my stomach to think that the money that would be given through my evaluation was most likely equivalent to one year of tax revenue from a random honest small business.
Where did you register yourself as an expert? Asking for a friend.
Oh man hard to remember. I can just tell you it was not on the official EU website. It was on a thematic one that probably doesn't exist anymore, something like "The coalition for the development of X in Europe".
What I also discovered is often let's say the EU wants to give 10M to 10 projects in a particular domain. Then a there are companies specialised in applying as a project and saying: our project is actually to subdivide this 1M into 8 times 100K and we keep 200K as a fee (I am simplifying but that was the idea).
> Point at a single project of this sort that had any tangible output that's still in use.
Not sure what is your limiting factor (just universities + industry consortiums or explicit IT projects?).
Graphene Flagship might be an example, with their research on Graphene they contributed to the foundation of more efficient batteries and solar panels, innovation in automotive and commercial products and so on.
Clean Sky Joint Undertaking (CSJU) also had quite some impact on the industry (I think it was part of EU's Horizon 2020). They worked on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions and noise of Aircrafts and contributed quite a bit to the European industry (Rotor engine innovations, advanced greener materials, etc.)
And I think the discovery of the Higgs boson was also the result of a European Research consortium with CERN...
So yeah, Europe is surely not the center of all innovation and economic efficiency, but I wouldn't demonize every attempt to change that...
Graphene Flagship was an irredeemable disaster. €1 B pumped into research and commercialisation and the result is a DOA graphene industry in the EU, left in the dust by China and the US.
Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster that missed all its targets.
As stated elsewhere, CERN is a cautionary tale - the LHC is a vestige of a time when Europe was an economic and scientific powerhouse. If the last 15-20 years we have become an also-ran to the US and China.
There's an endless list of these soft failed Horizon projects:
* Human Brain Project * European Processor Initiative * Innovative Medicines Initiative * LIGHTest * The Once-Only Principle Project * OpenAIRE * Quantum Flagship
And on and on. No results. No ROI.
> Graphene Flagship was an irredeemable disaster
According to whom, based on which metric?
This is foundational material and chemistry research, with UK, Germany and Spain at the forefront for an industry which will probably need another 10 years to fully unfold.
For sure other China and US were able to invest more, but should the EU have not invested at all?
> Clean Sky Joint Undertaking was also a disaster
Also here, based on which metric?
The cost was split in half among the EU and industry players, and those companies (i.e. Airbus, Saab, Rolls-Royce, Safran, Liebherr, Thales) are all still at the forefront of their respective industries, despite competition from much larger markets. It's a sensible strategy to support them while steering aspects of their R&D towards a specific set of common goals for the EU.
Yeah, among others they had a goal of achieving a 50% cut in CO2 emissions just by improving fuel efficiency, a quite ambitious goal they didn't reach. But they set and co-funded the direction and achieved a 30% reduction.
They also had a goal of achieving 50% noise reduction for aircrafts, and ultimately developed concepts with up to 70% lower noise-production. Without such funding I doubt that such research would have even been conducted.
--
So yes, there's a much larger list of failed Horizon projects, fully agree. And many of them shouldn't even exist in hindsight. But it's research, it's supposed to be an uncertain field with uncertain commercial value. I rather have the EU fund 5 moonshots with 3 of them questionable than decide to not fund any research in Europe unless the commercial value is first proven by someone else.
There are areas I don't know how they would even be funded by a for-profit market without such initiatives, like the Rail Joint Undertaking which aims to develop and harmonize the European rail system across borders of EU countries.
[dead]