A different way of defining tomorrow's industry
In keeping with the goal set at the 2000 Lisbon Summit to make Europe
the world's most competitive economy, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin unveiled the launch of the new French industrial policy by the
Interministerial Regional Planning and Development Committee (CIADT) on
14 September 2004.
The stated objective focuses firmly on building centres of
competitiveness to step up French industry's specialisation, create the
conditions for new lines of business with a high international profile
and improve the drawing power of the different parts of France.
What is a centre of competitiveness? The CIADT defines it as a "group
of businesses, training centres and research units in a given area
involved in a partnership approach designed to generate synergies for
shared innovative projects and with the critical mass necessary for
international visibility".
To be more precise, the aim is to persuade businesses, researchers
and local political representatives to work together, to encourage the
pooling of resources, purchasing groups, shared premises and so on; to
involve human resources in development by grouping together employers;
to foster links between industries, research and education; to further
business start ups; to promote networking policy at European level and
to associate the regions with it.
Granted, centres of competitiveness are not really a new concept
since France already has some models of this kind, such as Cosmetic
Valey in Eure-et-Loir, which has generated 1,360 jobs in ten years.
However, these centres so far have a relatively small weight in the
national economy whereas such networks called "clusters" or "districts"
have been operating successfully for years in the United States and
other European countries such as Denmark, Italy and Galicia in Spain.
It has to be said that many reports have put the case for their
development. The Delegation for Regional Planning and Action (DATAR)
study dated 23 February 2004 recommended a number of measures to manage
economic change, including the creation of "local production systems"
called SPLs or "centres of competitiveness".
Nicolas Jacquet, Director of DATAR, feels that France is still quite
definitely an industrial power, but that it is changing. And the main
question is how to manage the changes. Since, "Tomorrow's industry will
be mainly a consumer of brainpower", he explains. MP Christian Blanc's
report published in April 2004 comes to the same conclusion.
It explores how to develop the French system seen as too vertical and
to compartmentalised and shows how certain developed countries and
regions - Sweden, Finland, Catalonia, Bavaria and others - have managed
to remain competitive despite high labour costs.
And the report stresses that, "Innovation is the hard core of
tomorrow's economy". Following the October 2003 creation of an
Interministerial Task Force on Economic Change (MIME), the Prime
Minister signed a circular regarding planning for and managing economic
change on 28 January 2004.
Among other things, this circular defined the roles to be played by
DATAR and MIME: DATAR's role is to steer local management of economic
change.
Melina Gazsi, Actualite En France |
