Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol2-1 > Innovation France

The French economy has not escaped the deep recession experienced by all countries since the recent financial crisis. This is coupled with negative trends in GDP growth rate, -0.4% in 2008 and still below the EU-27 average (0.8%). According to OECD Economic Outlook, real GDP is expected to decrease by over 3% during 2009, with a decline in production and a weak recovery in 2010.

The crisis impacted all sectors, particularly the automotive industry (the main French R&D performer) and large firms, in turn affecting small businesses and components’ suppliers to the industry.

Other sectors, such as biotech, were also impacted by the crisis and experienced a drop in capital investment. The government has decided multiple plans aimed at fostering the overall economy, given a political emphasis on automotive, eco-technologies and nanotechnologies. These received anticipated or extra funding.

France remains in the EIS “Innovation followers” grouping – over the last five years it has positive results in EIS Enablers indicators (the drivers of innovation that are external to the firm and particularly in human resources, and finance and support); and Outputs indicators especially in terms of Innovators and economic effects indicators. France is below the EU average in Firm activities however (firm investments, linkage, entrepreneurship and throughputs). For several years now, France’s main weaknesses lie in low private-resource mobilisation for R&D and behaviour of companies.

The main objectives for the French innovation policy are to strengthen incentives towards the private sector, to invest more in research, to develop synergies between the key actors of the innovation process and to support SME competitiveness. The overall structure of RDI policy design and implementation continues to be clarified and improved.

Main innovation challenges

• Increase business R&D investment.
• Improve transfer from public research to innovation.
• Foster innovative SMEs growth through better funding.

Conclusions

Major brainstorming and benchmarking of policy practices has led to major reforms, by simplifying the overall innovation policies’ planning and delivery mechanisms. These reforms impacted the innovation policy effectiveness, most notably in the way it is defined and implemented.

The national strategy for research and innovation, the first document of its kind established in France, has to be fully implemented to improve the overall quality of the innovation policy through the enhancement of the visibility and coherence of the system.

All the efforts that are being made in terms of concentrating the funding on significant support measures (CIR, Competitiveness clusters), also have to be monitored and evaluated on a regular basis.

Funding and planning for evaluation and qualitative monitoring will be defined at the time an overall policy or support measure is defined, as it has been done for the competitiveness cluster policy.