Читать книгу Innovation in Clusters - Estelle Vallier - Страница 9

In recent decades, most industrialized countries have opted for strategies that boost the potential outputs from innovators or creators (goods and services resulting from innovation) by legislating and investing in them. The main public investment consists of aligning the creation, or scientific discovery phase as closely as possible to its technological and industrial application. Efforts are essentially expected from researchers, who are encouraged to become entrepreneurs, or at least to make their research immediately available for industrial use (Stehr 2000). Thus, the expression “contextualization of science” (Gibbons et al. 1994) has been coined, within European institutions, to describe the process of heteronomization of science by other social fields, principally economic; it must be accountable to society and, above all, be involved in the commercialization of its results (Lamy and Shinn 2006, p. 47). In France, the 1999 Innovation and Research Act, also known as the “Allègre Act”², is presented as the significant legislative tool that guarantees a better contextualization of science. Indeed, it enables researchers, based on their scientific results, to create a company and/or to register patents. In order to support these new kinds of entrepreneurs in the creation of their start-ups, the Act provides for the reinforcement of the creation of public incubators. These structures are intended to provide, not direct financial, but indirect resources to assist in the setting up of a company: legal advice, construction of a business plan, filing of patents, search for public and private funding, etc. Incubators also provide privileged access to material resources, such as premises or equipment. This legislative framework complements the advantageous tax structure provided to research and development (R&D) since 1983 with research tax credits (crédit d’impôt recherche, CIR). Tax reduction, which is granted to companies based on their R&D expenditure, is the largest financial investment by the government in this area, especially since the 2008 reform under President Sarkozy³. In a 2013 report⁴, the Court of Auditors highlighted the significant tax advantage represented by CIR, which primarily favors large companies⁵, without any real impact on the recruitment of scientific personnel in the private sector, particularly young doctors. Despite numerous warnings and limitations, demonstrated on several occasions by research actors, including a report by the CNRS and a survey report by the researchers’ association “Science en marche (Science on the move)” (Métivier 2015), and by institutional actors⁶, it was renewed by the Valls government in 2015. This renewal demonstrates the political vision of innovation and its public governance, which, despite criticism from higher education circles, favors the commercialization of research within private companies.

Indeed, French innovation policies are characteristic of governmental adherence to neoliberal rationale. Often represented as a doctrine of state withdrawal, it does not, however, manifest itself in a paralysis of public authorities. On the contrary, their involvement is redeployed and takes a different form: paradoxically, “while it advocates the withdrawal of politics and the state, neoliberalism frequently results in their reaffirmation” (Epstein 2006, p. 96). Rather than guaranteeing the distribution of wealth among its territories and population, the state is actively providing a legal, social and fiscal framework to foster attractiveness, competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, etc. (Bruno and Didier 2013, pp. 38–39). To do this, the state governs remotely (Epstein 2006) via high-tech Colbertism (Cohen 1992) in sectors deemed promising for the economy of the future: digital, biotechnology, nanotechnology, Big Data, etc. It is becoming an actor in global competition, through a selective location policy, which aims to attract the most innovative companies and the most affluent social classes to these territories, in order to stimulate a new development model (Brenner 2004). This is by no means specific to France. The scope of success stories such as Silicon Valley, and the legend around the innovators who have emerged from it, generally ignores the massive and historic public investment in the United States (Mazzucato 2015). Thus, the European Union, through two major projects, the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy, intends to provide the framework for the development of a knowledge-based economy. Public policies in favor of the concentration of innovative activities on technical–scientific–industrial sites (Sainsaulieu and Saint-Martin 2017, p. 11), or, in a word, clusterization, represent one of its tools. France has not escaped this and is renewing its policies, as it did in the past with the nuclear and aeronautical industries, by relying on the concept of clustering in order to develop and position innovation (Lamy and Le Roux 2017, p. 89).