Today the team of PRESANS was invited to participate to the press conference organized by the French Ministry of Research about the new service that they are launching early 2010: a website to facilitate collaboration between academia and industry. This sounds like a new competitor of PRESANS… well, not quite as it seems that they also would like to partner with us.
Valérie Pécresse Speech
We give below a few points that Valérie Pécresse, our minister of Research has risen during the course of the conference.
Actions to accelerate innovation
To accelerate innovation, the parallel existence of the two distinct worlds (public and private research) has to end. The country (France) has to join the new trend of Open Innovation. This is why the French government has started a number of actions to facilitate the implementation of Open Innovation. These actions include:
- The aggregation of several universities and Research and Development centers.
- The gathering of Technology Transfer Offices.
- The Crédit d’Impôt Recherche (French tax return system on R&D expenditure for companies, which, by the way, makes France a fiscal Paradise for R&D.
The crisis accelerate actions
According to Valérie Pécresse, the Crisis accelerates efforts to increase collaborations between academia and industry: she gave as an example the number of recent very large partnerships that have recently been signed between large industrial groups and large research centers (ex: the CEA, the Renault-Nissan alliance and the FSI).
The Meetic of Research
“The French ministry of Research is launching the Meetic of Research.”
Valérie Pécresse, Minister of Research
The implementation of Open Innovation in France also means that mentalities have to change. For this, the dialog between industry and public research has to increase and has to be facilitated. A number of public actors, such as the French ANR (National Agency for Research) and the Réseau Carnot have an important role to play to reach this goal. To go further, the ministry of Research has mandated the ANR for the creation a website whose ambition is to become the “Meetic of Research” (sic. Valérie Pécresse). The purpose of this upcoming website is to provide
- a mapping of public expertise
- a place where industrialists can advertise needs
For the launching of this new public web platform, a few companies (Renault, HP, Orange, Sanofi-Aventis, Roche, Gostai and LFB), already involved in Open Innovation, will publish needs and researchers will be able to offer their expertise.
Why isn’t this new service a competitor of PRESANS ?
Here are a few reasons why we think that this new service is great and complementary of what we do at PRESANS.
- PRESANS is international: our clients and our experts are international.
- PRESANS is proactive: we actively look for new clients and new experts.
- PRESANS is designed to also provide solutions (and not only connections with experts).
- PRESANS ensures that Experts are happy to ensure the client needs: they have made the choice to register for that!
- PRESANS has access to Experts in the public sector, but also in private labs, startups etc.
- Last reason, it seems that they would like to partner with us (and other startups), which is really an excellent piece of news.
