Civil Engineering Reference
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€840 million from the single interministerial fund, €500 million from public
agencies that are dealing with innovation, mainly the National Research Agency
and OSEO, and €160 million in the form of tax incentives/tax breaks. The R&D
projects are the core activity of the competitiveness clusters. More than 1,000
R&D projects, jointly organized by private companies and research institutes, were
financed during the period 2005 to 2008.
From 2008 to 2011, on top of the €2.7 billion from the public sector, some
€3 billion has been invested from the private sector. Therefore, €5.7 billion has
been invested in the R&D projects initiated by the competitiveness clusters. This
represents approximately 4.5 % of the national R&D expenses during that period.
3 Boosting Innovation by Facilitating Public and Private
Partnership on R&D
Facilitating public and private partnerships in R&D is one of the main objectives
of the competitiveness cluster. A competitiveness cluster is a platform for the
creation of cooperative projects between private enterprises, research centers and
academic institutions. The ultimate goal is to innovate together, or to introduce a
new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process a new mar-
keting method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace
organization, or external relations. R&D projects are thus the cluster's core
activity and constitute the main factor of their so-called competitiveness. They
should involve all the potential stakeholders of the clusters in a process of growing
innovative capabilities and competitiveness of the firms, especially the SMEs,
which traditionally in France have difficulties accessing R&D resources. The
project should also boost research institutes through public-private partnerships.
Indeed the projects have to include at least two firms and a research institute of the
cluster in order to be labeled as a cluster pole of competitiveness. These projects
are the engines for the working of the poles and thus the preconditions of the
success of this policy. The subsidies to the poles are not predetermined, they flow
from the R&D projects that have gained subsidies, as it will be shown.
In this analysis, the innovation clusters policy is viewed from two different
angles. First, we can consider that the competitiveness cluster policy as an inte-
grated series of French policy to promote public and private partnerships in R&D.
Second, we can also see the competitiveness clusters policy as an implementation
tool of the R&D policies. With the latter, we can identify several policies related to
R&D development that have been supporting the implementation of the compet-
itiveness cluster policy.
First, the adoption of the Innovation and Research Act in 1999, the law aims to
modernize and reorganize the French innovation system. The main objectives are to
encourage technology diffusion and the exploitation of research results and inno-
vation. The Innovation Act has four main areas: (i) encouraging the mobility of
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