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One of the most startling cultural differences for me about living in the UK was, and still is, the expectation that government should help with so many things. Health care, child care, home health care for people who need help with activities of daily living, a “safety net” of benefits (welfare) for people who are disabled or down on their luck…
Society seemed to be puttering along better on the whole when all of that was intact, but the portion that favors businesses has weathered these years in much better condition than what individuals rely upon. It isn’t fully intact. Brexit separated the UK from a variety of grant programs for business and especially for research. But in situations where Americans would be pitching to angel investors or venture capitalists for the money to build or grow a Grand New Thing, in the UK the first impulse is to seek a government grant.
More than a dozen years ago I got involved in the writing of an application for EU grant funding for a business venture. The project involved a small British company, a British university, and a university on the Continent. The decision to apply was made too close to the deadline. I wrote like a madwoman alongside a man who calculated figures like a madman.
We missed the deadline because one of the universities didn’t provide their portion in time. I suspect our application wouldn’t have passed muster after being thrown together so fast, but we never got to find out. At the time I was disappointed.
A few years later I met someone whose company had won an EU Framework grant in a previous grant cycle. He said getting that grant was one of the worst decisions he ever made. Satisfying the demands for paperwork, inspections and audits to satisfy the funding authorities consumed so much time and money that little of the grant was left for making any actual progress. He said we were lucky not to get a grant.
From his remarks, I thought the tradeoff businesses make when they get a grant instead of investor funding must be the bureaucratic burden, eroding the amount of the funding that can be applied to whatever needs to be done. That wasn’t the whole story.
In the past couple of years I’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to pursue a grant from the UK government. It’s maddening. Each element of the application has to answer a specific question within a tight word limit. Assessors give such helpful feedback as wanting more detail where you already squeezed as much as possible into the allotted space.
Looking at the financial calculations and the timelines for one such project, I see the missing piece about the tradeoff in getting a grant.
It’s time.
It takes months to put together a grant application. It takes more months for the applications to be examined and chosen or rejected. After an application is accepted, it takes more months before the project is allowed to start. Only then does the bureaucratic burden of compliance kick in, and it does more than reduce the amount of money available for project work. It siphons resources away to satisfy the bureaucracy, and that slows down the work.
”Free money” from the grant makes an invention take longer to get created, an innovative product take longer to be ready for the market, or a patent lose a significant portion of its life before something is made with it that can be sold.
The most important tradeoff is time and therefore diminished advantage or reduced opportunity.
Free money could turn out to be very costly indeed.
Very interesting. I am not surprised, in the least. These processes should be streamlined, or it all works, (or doesn't) like you describe. It's almost like a designed to fail process, so governments and institutions can claim to be helpful, generous, but aren't-- in reality.