The EU grants are ridiculously red tapey. Companies have entire departments dedicated to the red tape that European grants require, from the initial participation / auction with hundreds or thousands of pages of documentation, through various stages of thorough checkbox ticking, to the final reception of the project.
Only the usual players with well established "EU Funds" departments can realistically get them, such as Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Microsoft etc.
I have seen (and worked in) a number of startups that did receive research grants including AI research in Germany. This notion of terrible European bureaucracy is exaggerated. It’s not worse than anywhere else in the world.
I've helped the EU Funds departments at my previous employer with auctions participation and other similar checkbox ticking exercises, they're impossible to navigate for regular companies.
I suppose the amount of red tape depends on the type of grant. In my case, I once helped with national level grants to enhance the border protection systems, deployment throughout an entire country. The amount of time and effort to simply participate in such an auction was absolutely ridiculous.
In any case, none of the auctions or checkbox ticking exercises would have been manageable by startups, companies definitely need entire departments dedicated to these funds, and I'm not referring to project management, but strictly red tape.
>none of the auctions or checkbox ticking exercises would have been manageable by startups
Generally startups should not be in government supply chain unless it is explicitly permitted / requested. They are by definition too risky for public to rely on their services, so it's ok that they cannot pass the checkbox ticking exercise. In rare cases where their presence is desirable (e.g. to boost innovation or find radically new solutions), government can always step in and offer them sherpa service (as it usually happens) to go through the paperwork.
Whether the whole regulation is necessary, is another question. I think it does, but the process must be more cost-efficient. It can be. I have seen in some places how the government has put focus on bureaucratic efficiency and it worked, but that often means a strategic horizon of a few decades, which is not within the reach of most democracies today: you need a stable government and public consensus.
As a German, I have to disagree. The bureaucracy both of Germany and the EU is terrible. I have multiple friends who left Germany, and the bureaucracy played a significant role.
I work with EU grants and it’s really not. The amount of wasted work that goes into them is insane. Admin overhead is massive and it’s spent not just from the grants but also from all the companies that apply and don’t get them.
I have no experience in this whatsoever but I feel like it's good to have some transparent bureoucracy even if it's slightly inconvenient if the alternative is to toss around billions in an opaque and corrupt manner like the way bookkeeping (or lack thereof) in global scale climate funds works. Note that I don't have experience in the latter either nor sources to give, yet this is the impression I have. Feel free to correct.
Can confirm. I experienced EU EC research project red tape to similar than DARPA.
Most of the red tape comes from excesses or abuses from the past. Government agencies tend to slap an extra layer of rules every time the grant money is being misused.
Those kind of rules also reveal what is being interpreted as misuse or abuse. For instance, you cannot expense a meal that includes an alcoholic beverage on an US federal budget.
I am European and I tend to agree. The way it's currently going, it'll self-select for people who are good at filling out forms, which will either be the giant companies that can afford to hire what are effectively tax-funded civil servants (they happen to be employed by companies, but only exist because of the government and are effectively a tax on business).
Or there'll be a common European subgenre of "startups" that exclusively draw funding from EU/govs because they're great at filling out forms and telling paper pushers what they want to hear. Then they ship some hypercompliant product nobody wants to use.
Some regulations are definitely good—like food quality standards—when applied correctly and without giving a free pass to other countries (e.g., Morocco, Ukraine).
But then you have bad regulations, such as NIS, salary "transparency," nuclear energy restrictions, the Digital Markets Act, the AI Act, and Farm to Fork, among others.
On top of that, there’s the massive cost to taxpayers just to keep those people in Brussels.
