better world. One of the main levers of innovation policies in industrialized countries is to organize meetings between researchers and industrialists, particularly within innovation clusters that bring together companies, laboratories and training within a particular sector. Thus, the validity and legitimacy of these mechanisms, which take shape in dedicated locations, formerly called technopoles, now known as clusters, no longer need to be proven. Tomorrow’s economy, like a promise that is always being renewed, is germinating in these places through the combined effects of innovation, its territorialization and the power of the intricate and informal relationships that are generated there. This book is particularly concerned with the articulation between the promise of innovation and the interactions observed within a particular cluster.
I.1. Innovation policies and the clustering process
In France, innovation clusters are the result of a legislative and fiscal framework that has encouraged closer ties between science and industry for more than 30 years. In this context, the state, as well as international and European authorities, is particularly encouraging territories to develop clustering policies. However, this logic is not a new idea and has been the subject of work since the 19th century, under other names. The term cluster, on the other hand, was conceptualized in North American management literature in the 1990s and has found favor in most public policies in industrialized countries.
I.1.1. Ensuring the legal and fiscal framework for the partnership between science and industry: governing from a distance
In recent decades, most industrialized countries have opted for strategies that boost the potential outputs from innovators or creators (goods and services resulting from innovation) by legislating and investing in them. The main public investment consists of aligning the creation, or scientific discovery phase as closely as possible to its technological and industrial application. Efforts are essentially expected from researchers, who are encouraged to become entrepreneurs, or at least to make their research immediately available for industrial use (Stehr 2000). Thus, the expression “contextualization of science” (Gibbons et al. 1994) has been coined, within European institutions, to describe the process of heteronomization of science by other social fields, principally economic; it must be accountable to society and, above all, be involved in the commercialization of its results (Lamy and Shinn 2006, p. 47). In France, the 1999 Innovation and Research Act, also known as the “Allègre Act”2, is presented as the significant legislative tool that guarantees a better contextualization of science. Indeed, it enables researchers, based on their scientific results, to create a company and/or to register patents. In order to support these new kinds of entrepreneurs in the creation of their start-ups, the Act provides for the reinforcement of the creation of public incubators. These structures are intended to provide, not direct financial, but indirect resources to assist in the setting up of a company: legal advice, construction of a business plan, filing of patents, search for public and private funding, etc. Incubators also provide privileged access to material resources, such as premises or equipment. This legislative framework complements the advantageous tax structure provided to research and development (R&D) since 1983 with research tax credits (crédit d’impôt recherche, CIR). Tax reduction, which is granted to companies based on their R&D expenditure, is the largest financial investment by the government in this area, especially since the 2008 reform under President Sarkozy3. In a 2013 report4, the Court of Auditors highlighted the significant tax advantage represented by CIR, which primarily favors large companies5, without any real impact on the recruitment of scientific personnel in the private sector, particularly young doctors. Despite numerous warnings and limitations, demonstrated on several occasions by research actors, including a report by the CNRS and a survey report by the researchers’ association “Science en marche (Science on the move)” (Métivier 2015), and by institutional actors6, it was renewed by the Valls government in 2015. This renewal demonstrates the political vision of innovation and its public governance, which, despite criticism from higher education circles, favors the commercialization of research within private companies.
Indeed, French innovation policies are characteristic of governmental adherence to neoliberal rationale. Often represented as a doctrine of state withdrawal, it does not, however, manifest itself in a paralysis of public authorities. On the contrary, their involvement is redeployed and takes a different form: paradoxically, “while it advocates the withdrawal of politics and the state, neoliberalism frequently results in their reaffirmation” (Epstein 2006, p. 96). Rather than guaranteeing the distribution of wealth among its territories and population, the state is actively providing a legal, social and fiscal framework to foster attractiveness, competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, etc. (Bruno and Didier 2013, pp. 38–39). To do this, the state governs remotely (Epstein 2006) via high-tech Colbertism (Cohen 1992) in sectors deemed promising for the economy of the future: digital, biotechnology, nanotechnology, Big Data, etc. It is becoming an actor in global competition, through a selective location policy, which aims to attract the most innovative companies and the most affluent social classes to these territories, in order to stimulate a new development model (Brenner 2004). This is by no means specific to France. The scope of success stories such as Silicon Valley, and the legend around the innovators who have emerged from it, generally ignores the massive and historic public investment in the United States (Mazzucato 2015). Thus, the European Union, through two major projects, the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy, intends to provide the framework for the development of a knowledge-based economy. Public policies in favor of the concentration of innovative activities on technical–scientific–industrial sites (Sainsaulieu and Saint-Martin 2017, p. 11), or, in a word, clusterization, represent one of its tools. France has not escaped this and is renewing its policies, as it did in the past with the nuclear and aeronautical industries, by relying on the concept of clustering in order to develop and position innovation (Lamy and Le Roux 2017, p. 89).
I.1.2. Clustering: an old idea at the heart of current innovation policies
High-tech clusters have been the subject of a wealth of research, principally in economics and management sciences, as well as in geography and sociology. Much of the literature can be traced back to the neoclassical economist Alfred Marshall and his concept of the industrial district, considered to be the ancestor of the cluster. As early as 1890, he defined it as coordination by the market and the reciprocity of a social division of labor between small specialized firms within a large productive process (Benko et al. 1996, p. 120). His approach was revisited in the 1970s by Italian7 sociologists and economists as a framework for analyzing their research on the Third Italy8, which specialized in traditional (clothing, footwear, leather, furniture, etc.) or more modern (small-scale mechanics, electrical engineering, etc.) activities (Daumas 2007). Based on Marshall’s work and his analysis of the province of Prato in Tuscany, Beccatini defines the Italian district form as follows:
A socio-territorial entity characterized by the active association, in a circumscribed and historically determined territorial area, of a community of people and a population of industrial enterprises. In the district, unlike what happens in other environments, such as the manufacturing city, community and business tend to, as it were, interpenetrate (Becattini 1989, p. 15).
This idea of interpenetration between economic structures and individuals is taken up again in policies of technopolization and then clusterization. While the work on districts was aimed at analyzing existing environments, technopoles are the first political attempts to develop niches of specialization, in order to foster social and economic environments conducive to exchanges. Moreover, it is no longer just a matter of prioritizing inter-firm relationships in the Italian districts, but of reproducing the American science–industry relationship models. The most analyzed, of these, during the 1990s, were Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area (Saxenian 1996; Ferrary and Pesqueux 2004) and Route 128 in Boston. In these studies, the emphasis is on the concentration of companies in the same sector, as well as on the geographical proximity of research laboratories and educational institutions, so that informal relationships emerge that promote innovation,
