It's essentially a way of outsourcing management structures. Instead of having to handle and process 1000 $1M projects (and probably 20000 proposals) it awards a $1B project that is then in charge of managing that money and awarding subprojects, etc. It's also a good way of getting press and making sure that a fair amount of$ ends up in the pockets of your buddies working on a specific topic.

This is why the US NIH gives out a lot of $3-5M R01 grants.

Why the scare quotes around European Commission?

The scare-quote type of usage for quotation marks is common in English but not universal across all languages. As many Hacker News commenters are not native English speakers, it makes sense to assume quotes are not always used for that meaning.

I assume because this is the first time they've heard of it.

It would be far better to give one thousand risky cutting edge projects one million dollars.

The various European governments already do that kind of thing through their national agencies. The thinking behind these giant EU projects is to fund larger-scale ambitions over a decade or more. (Not saying it's been the best use of money so far, but that was the aim anyway.)

Reminds me of all of the "innovation" grants and credit schemes the Canadian government keeps trying to do to "foster innovative companies and entrepenuership" and "create jobs" but on a much, much bigger scale. In Canada almost all of it gets siphoned off by useless projects started by ex-executives from big name mega-companies (ie IBM) or by people who are experts at navigating gov grant processes. Meanwhile the actual startups who lack access to angel/venture capital in Canada rarely see any of it and continue to flock to America.

10yr run ways and massive amounts of capital sounds like the perfect recipe for black hole a money pit.

I'd rather leave 'innovation' to academia and private industry. If they want to help then make those two things easier, don't try to do it yourself (like trying to pick the winners).

And the European Commission also does it, see ERC grants. Giving risky cutting edge programs 1 million dollars is almost their definition (except that it's 1.5 to 2M).