Re: Suggestions for participating institutions?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/26/2013 11:52 AM, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> Take in mind that EU research programmes come with an incredible
> amount of burocracy and require both academic and industry partners,
> the more the merrier. The projects that get funded are buzzword
> compliant, but often nobody knows what they set out to do, except
> divert EU money into the partnering institutions.

Buzzword compliance is not particularly a problem, except for the fact that you
want to chew your own head off after writing all those sickening words ;-)  And
the bureaucracy is mainly a matter of time and effort -- it helps very much if
you have some people who can effectively be full time preparing the grant 
proposal.

But I agree that the academic/industry partnership is the key thing to get
right.  There is a bias towards prestigious institutions, and towards
pan-European and cross-disciplinary projects that also bring in industry
partners.  So ideally I think that what you'd want to have is _at least_ two
fairly prominent music colleges in different countries together with _at least_
two different computer science departments in different countries, _at least_
one reasonably well known music publisher, and preferably at least one other
research group from a different discipline (in this case, educational research
seems like an obvious choice).

Reading not too deeply between the lines it looks like what they are really
after is tablet and smartphone based learning solutions, with the goal being to
get apps on popular devices.  So you could also look for another industry
partner in the form of developers for mobile/touch platforms.  In fact the ideal
might be an app that allows a well-known publisher to disseminate their
published works on tablet/smartphone in a way that allows a great deal of
interaction with those works.

Would I be right in assuming that this is quite a UK-driven call for
participation?  It sounds like the sort of thing which is being pushed in
British education.

And, sad to say, it wouldn't surprise me if this call has been issued in
anticipation of a preconceived product development by Sibelius (despite UK
office defunct-ness), Finale or Steinberg, in collaboration with already
selected academic partners ...