Pôles de Compétitivité - a model for EIIs and KICs?

Thursday, 21 August 2008 

France’s Pôles de Compétitivité (official English translation: “competitiveness clusters”) came into being three years ago. Except for their focus on regional competitiveness (implied by the rule that the companies, research centres and universities in a Pöle must come from the same locality), their mission seems similar to those of both the SET Plan’s European Industrial Initiatives and the European Institute of Technology’s Knowledge and Innovation Communities. Here’s what the official ‘Pôles’ website says:

For a given local area, a Pôle is defined as:

- an association of companies, research centres and educational institutions,
- working in partnership (under a common development strategy),
- to generate synergies in the execution of innovative projects in the interest of one or more given markets.

To be successful, Pôles will, amongst other things, “need to reach sufficient critical mass to acquire and develop international visibility.”

These are familiar themes. Pôles must involve the same actors that The EIT’s KICs will involve. Working in partnership according to a common strategy will be a feature of the EIIs. Innovation in a particular area of technology is crucially important to both EIIs and KICs. A self-sustaining network (‘critical mass’) is the aim of KICs (Art. 6 §1 a).

Three Pôles deal predominantly, or exclusively, with renewable energy and its integration into energy systems: DERBI (Languedoc Roussillon), TENERRDIS (Rhône-Alpes, Drôme, Isère, Savoie) and CAPENERGIES (Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Corsica). The projects they have approved have gone on to receive a total of 735M EUR funding from various French public funding agencies. Projects are of the order of 1-4 M EUR depending on the Pôle. A fourth Pôle looks at fuel cells, hydrogen and batteries (S2E2 – regions of Centre and Limousin).

An evaluation of the Pôles’ achievements, published on June 18, puts the first three of the Pôles mentioned above among the 39 judged to be working fine. S2E2 needs an overhaul.

Recommendation number 25 of the evaluators was that France should work harder to link the Pôles with similar initiatives in other EU countries. They suggest:

Training the managers of Pôles in finding funding for approved projects in FP7 or the Structural Funds

Helping and encouraging members of Pôles to seek contact with companies, educational institutions or research centres in other countries

Ensuring France’s Pöles interact with similar clusters in other countries.

Perhaps managers of Pôles will comply with the recommendation by linking them to EIIs or KICs.

Voir: http://www.eurec.be/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=29