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Whence the term entrepreneur, that all-American classifier for the successful man or woman industrialist? It comes from Jean-Baptiste Say, economist and a captain of the textile industry in 1805. Who invented venture capital? It was military engineer General Georges F. Doriot, while teaching management at Harvard 60 years ago. And in 1974 Roland Moreno patented the first credit-card chip. They were all French, as were Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman--creators of the strong economic, political and technical alliance now called the European Union (EU). Yet in today's France it is waywardness in entrepreneurship and the frustrating lack of investment capital that have limited world-class innovation. Well aware of this endemic shortcoming, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been urging the nation to earn more money by working more, and his government is pushing hard on specific measures to ensure a maximum of innovation. One characteristic step in this direction is the combined role of the Agence pour la recherche (ANR) and the innovation authority known as OSEO (France's Small Business Administration). ANR, for example, is headed by mathematician Jacques Stern, an experienced handler of innovation funds. These bodies are the government's catalyst to coordinate financing and help innovative production to materialize. They feed 71 geographic clusters--emulations of Route 128 and Silicon Valley in the U.S.--called poles de competitivite, best translated as competition clusters or hubs. The idea is to turn laggard manufacturing centers of earlier times into coordination points for inventive synergy to meet 21st-century technology requirements head-on. The scheme is a direct translation in France of the EU's Lisbon strategy to promote growth and employment. It commenced around 2000 and the 71 clusters were completed by 2004-5. The innovation clusters are literally all over the map below--from the balmy Aerospace Valley and home of the Airbus around Toulouse in the south to the former machinery and textile region roundabout Lille in the north. The six-dozen clusters are divided among those deriving from 1) French specializations (high-speed trains, marine technology, quality cosmetics), 2) new industries seeking global roles (agricultural and food biotechnologies, ICT), and 3) those already competing aggressively on world markets: pharmaceuticals, automotive and commercial air transport, opto-electronics, telecommunication networks. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There is a complex cluster specializing in plastics, near the Gallo-Roman city of Lyon. Another typical hub centers on the city of Limoges, once famous for its luxury chinaware and today developing quality industrial ceramics. The French Approach Beginning early in the 21st century, when the fashions of marketing and total quality analysis had taken hold among designers, engineers and production controllers, the new buzz words became knowledge society and economic intelligence. These quickly made their way into France's boardrooms and management schools, and by 2004-5 had translated into the new geographic clusters of technical innovation. Thus, keen competition is now solidly in, notably affecting a conservative society that has spent the past two centuries trying to rationalize why the latest business philosophies need not apply to France's economy. The nation-wide network designed for excellence in management as well as innovative approaches is also France's specific contribution (worth 31 million [euro]) to the EU's 77 million [euro], eight-year project known as Osiris. The aim here is to develop new solid-state fermentation processes and specific products meant to improve to biofuel yields. Companies involved are the French Soufflet and Maguin firms, working together with biochemists of the Institute of Science and Supermolecular Engineering in Strasbourg. Here, EU approval in October 2007 was contingent on appreciation of the scheme's Europe-wide applicability. …
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