It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers were asked to come up with defined projects that could be justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did, and we actually did the projects, but might have done them anyway.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
> some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine...
I mostly agree with you, except with this statement. It's not fine, the companies that fall into this trap are wasting their time and resources on something that is not a real opportunity. This is the main source of waste imho and unfortunately happens a lot in EU projects.
The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the tax incentive.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.