From a CORDIS report on the (EU research) FP6 mid-term review:
While welcoming the new instruments as tools which really do encourage integration and collaboration, Professor Bullinger questioned whether such large consortia really fulfil the aims of increasing flexibility and reducing bureaucracy. He added that with so many partners involved in each project, the amount of EU funding received by each partner is often low.
Good to hear this said at that sort of level. Every cycle EU research funding seems to go for bigger and bigger projects. Everyone gets together to bid (and bidding costs an insane amount of work) but to what extent is the work done by these huge projects integrated, and to what extent merely collected? Some work just can't be done without big funding, and some of that requires large scale collaboration, but in the end money begets beaurocracy. I'm convinced that vastly more — and more interesting — research would be done if money was handed out in smaller packages to a wider range of people.
In the very next paragraph it says,
… he proposed that more is allocated to project management …
which seems rather at odds with the above quoted view.
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