Civil Engineering Reference
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competitiveness clusters. Furthermore, 75 % of the funds were allocated to support
collaborative R&D projects. The Single Interministerial Fund (Fonds Unique In-
ternimisteriel (FUI)) only finances projects which involve activities with at least
two private enterprises and one public research institution, and that are developed
within the competitiveness clusters. So far, FUI is a main policy instrument to
promote public and private partnership in R&D. During the period 2005-2011,
FUI allocated more then €1 billion for R&D collaborative projects. The other
agency that supports the collaborative R&D project is ANR. During the period
2008-2011, the Agency spent €748 million to support collaborative projects in the
competitiveness clusters.
The collaborative R&D projects have generated 2,500 innovations, with two-
thirds of them focusing on product and process innovation. Among the most
innovative sectors are IAA, ICT, energy, materials/mechanics, and engineering
and service. The projects have produced almost 1 million patents, particularly in
the field of ICT, biotechnology, health and energy, almost 6,500 scientific papers
published and 93 start-up companies nurtured in the competitiveness clusters.
However, the funds are not equally distributed among the clusters. There is a
big discrepancy between the funds distribution and the number of poles concerned;
the 6 clusters (four global clusters and two global vocation clusters) out of 71
obtained one-third (33 %) of the total funds. Half of the funds were allocated to 12
clusters. This discrepancy is a result of the bottom-up process of the collaborative
R&D projects selection. The selection process starts by a call from the government
to the members of the competitiveness cluster to submit their application for
collaborative R&D projects. For example, the results of the 12th call, announced
on 1 August 2011, 79 collaborative R&D projects, out of 132 applications, were
financed in this call, stemming from 55 poles totalling €73 million. This means
that 16 clusters (one out of five clusters) have not been able to build at least one
project qualifying to receive a funding. Usually, big clusters with better companies
and with better research facilities have more chance to win the selection rather
than the small clusters. The mechanism should, however, attempt to give more of
an opportunity to the members of the small competitiveness clusters to succeed in
the selection of the collaborative R&D projects.
4 Supporting the Growth of Innovative SMEs
One of the main objectives of the competitiveness clusters is to improve the
competitiveness of SMEs. The French government pays special attention to the
development of SMEs because they play a very important role in the French
economy. They account for more than 2.5 million enterprises which represent
97.28 % of the number of enterprises, they employ more than 9.2 million people
or contribute to 47.33 % of the total employment (Saoud
2010
). The development
of competitiveness clusters benefited from the policy measures that were taken by
the French authority related to the promotion of innovation in the SMEs, such as
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