back to article EU pledges huge spend for small biz R&D

The European Commission has pledged €6.4bn for research investments across Europe in various areas for both academics and small businesses. In total 16,000 organisations should benefit including 3,000 small businesses. The cash will be awarded after a 'call for proposals' - which should start later today. The Commission hopes …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    EU Gravy Train wastes tax payers money

    .... does anybody know where, when and how to apply?

    TT

  2. Jacqui

    SMB == Uni department

    They dont mean real commercial businesses - they are talking about the commercial arms of universities. These apply for the extra grants.

    Companies who do real commercial R+D apply for tax credits but this also means you automatically trigger a tax audit which can eat up to 3 man months - they are VERY thourough - which can kill a small business! Also tax credits come off corp tax so if you truly are a small business (less than many millions/annum turnover) dont even thing of applying for anything

    as the tax man will hit you where it hurts and your credits will be unclaimable anyway.

  3. Suboptimal Planet

    How to kickstart businesses? Get out of the way!

    "The Commission hopes the money will kickstart innovative businesses as well as create jobs."

    Ah yes, "innovative" as determined by a bureaucrat. We wouldn't want to leave this money in the hands of taxpayers, so that businesses innovate in order to meet the needs of customers. Far better to confiscate this wealth, and dish it out to projects favoured by the Eurocrats.

    The best thing the governments can do to kickstart businesses is to get out of the way.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Stop

    Piece of research I'd like to see

    Would be a study to see how much of *our* money (where do they think EU grant money comes *from*) has actually resulted in *measurable* improvements to products or processes marketed by *actual* companies in the EU.

    I suspect we may be looking at SBIR'isis, a merkin disease where companies just go from one SBIR grant to another, but don't actually improve *anything*.

    I'd *like* to be very wrong in this but I wonder if *any* actual work has been done on how successful this technology transfer (which is what this is about) has been.

    Something along the lines of "The x million euro grant enabled us to investigate how to do (clever industrial process) and has now enabled us to set up a thingy which has added Y million euros to our turnover".

    It's only an *improvement* if you measured what it was before and what you have now is *better*. Otherwise it's a waste of money.

    So stop till you *know* what's going on.

  5. Rogerborg

    Yup, politically directed research is big in Europe

    Didn't Germany do something like this in the 1930s?

    THREAD ENDED.

  6. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Boffin

    To be fair

    I think the issue is not government funding but *efficacy*.

    *Does* this cash kick start new companies, processes, products?

    DARPA certainly has a track record of developments they have forced along. Do EU projects have a similar one (but a less developed PR team)?

    Despite cutbacks the US has made *very* large (certainly by European and UK standards) investments in government funded R&D projects (Check DTIC and ECD sites for the *thousands* of R&D reports generated by this funding over *decades*. Now try to get that level of access to EU or UK reports).

    And the Japaneses fondness for picking winning industries to invest in is also well known.

    But has that money *achieved* the sort of business and job creation it's funders hoped for?

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