I just commented this in reply to another person but I feel you will understand it more.
I was just part of an FP7 EU project in which 11 organisations of 7 different countries participated... and gosh, the admin burden of that is horrible. I got to be a work package leader and unfortunately it means you can't really do a lot of R&D. The amount of forms you have to fill , all the Brussels reporting is amazing. Added to that, I think the whole "publish or perish" attitude of academia just is not for me. So what if I only publish one paper from the project? yeah, everybody things I am a loser and that my participation was not successful (yeah, nobody says that but...). It feels as if research is just done with the objective of publishing papers... not only that, but colleagues actually say it "but you know, we have to see how are we going to translate this research into publications".
On the other hand, I also worked in a smaller 3 year EPSRC project with 3 Universities and 3 industry partners. It "felt" better, although the 3 industry partners did not really care (each meeting they sent someone new because the other person was either out or doing something else, so the new guy didn't know anything about the project and was just in the meeting to fill in). In this project, at least each academic partner was doing whatever they wanted and just presented their work, and a the end of the project, something "practical" came out of it.
I was just part of an FP7 EU project in which 11 organisations of 7 different countries participated... and gosh, the admin burden of that is horrible. I got to be a work package leader and unfortunately it means you can't really do a lot of R&D. The amount of forms you have to fill , all the Brussels reporting is amazing. Added to that, I think the whole "publish or perish" attitude of academia just is not for me. So what if I only publish one paper from the project? yeah, everybody things I am a loser and that my participation was not successful (yeah, nobody says that but...). It feels as if research is just done with the objective of publishing papers... not only that, but colleagues actually say it "but you know, we have to see how are we going to translate this research into publications".
On the other hand, I also worked in a smaller 3 year EPSRC project with 3 Universities and 3 industry partners. It "felt" better, although the 3 industry partners did not really care (each meeting they sent someone new because the other person was either out or doing something else, so the new guy didn't know anything about the project and was just in the meeting to fill in). In this project, at least each academic partner was doing whatever they wanted and just presented their work, and a the end of the project, something "practical" came out of it.