December 2012, “Green transition” by Fabienne Picard

In September 2012, the Environmental Conference wrote the French governmental roadmap for the ecological transition, highlighting the implication of France in the energetic or ecological transition of society. The limits of a carbon intensive economy have been highlighted over the past years, and the current economic crisis has undoubtedly increased the societal impact of the growing cost of energy: the development of fuel poverty situations is a good example of it. Resources and technologies of energy are the core of every socio-technical system. An historical approach indicates that the evolution from one socio-technical system to another is often supported by a specific form of energy which contributes to economic development.

Since the mid-seventies, scholarly in innovation studies have focussed on technological systems: their characterisation but also their evolution and change. More recently, innovation studies have pointed out that technological changes meant to serve the main societal functions (transportation, communication, housing, feeding), go far beyond the mere technological question and encompass changes in uses, practices, laws, regulations… and other elements making up institutions according to North.

These changes in technological systems are referred to by the terms “sustainable transition” (www.transitionsnetwork.org) or “ecological transition” since the process includes the appearance and growth of socio-technical systems, respectful of the environment and careful about the conditions in which products are made and used, exploited and utilized, in particular energy resources : search for new sources of energy, development of renewable energies and utilization of new technologies(wind mills, solar, bio and geo energies). These innovation systems are characterized by the appearance of new technologies and also new actors, new institutions, new markets, new practices.

The roots of the notion of sustainability lie in the notion of sustainable development proposed by the Brundtland Report (1987). All these technologies have in common that they have a low carbon intensity which helps to reduce anthropic effects on climate change linked to the decrease in greenhouse effect gas, in particular Co2, and also contributes to a safer energy supply thanks to a greater diversification of sources. However we may be careful about the use of rare earth and metal in new energetic technologies could induce other forms of energetic dependence.

November 2012, “Tourism needs innovation” by Zeting Liu

Nowadays, “Where are you going for the holidays” is a common question during certain period of the year. Tourism becomes a normal activity. However, the touristic activities have long been a privilege reserved for aristocrats and the upper classes who have the money and the time to travel between destinations. “Tourism” as we know today has been developed in 1841 when an entrepreneur, Thomas Cook, has invented a new form of travel as a “package tours” by organizing a first trip from “Leicester to Loughborough”.

The democratization of tourism since 1960 has changed the situation. The number of international arrivals has increased by 40 times between 1950 (25 million) and 2011 (980 million). In 2010, tourism represents 4.2% of GDP and 5.4% of employment for OECD countries (4.4% and 5.7% of the member states of the European Union). (OECD, 2012, p.7) In addition, technological and environmental changes have profoundly modified the behavior of tourists. Tourism is no more considered as an individual action. It becomes more and more an “experience”, an exchange between the tourist and the destination and the local population. At the same time, we observe a sharp increase of arrivals in new tourist destinations in emerging countries.

This dynamic reveals at the same time opportunities and challenges for the actors of tourism sector. Tourism activity has a doubled character: it is both “immobile”, that is to say, rooted in a tourist destination and “mobile” thanks to the movement of tourists. On the one hand, the “destinations” must find new ways to attract tourists under the increasing international competition while preserving their natural and cultural resources. On the other hand, the professionals of tourism sector need to develop new products to meet increasingly varied customers and expectations.

And yet, tourism is no shortage of innovations. From the initiatives taken by the destinations such as Roros, Norway (winner of the “Tourism for Tomorrow” 2012) in promoting an old mining town as a sustainable destination, to a trip in space offered by Virgin Galactic – a space tourism company – by passing through Smartbox that innovates in the distribution of touristic products, tourism inspires local authorities as well as individuals to take initiatives and to benefit from this booming sector. Who are these innovators and entrepreneurs? How will the tourism industry progress? It will be interesting to explore the new activities or the tourism markets of tomorrow as well as to study how a territory and its people can transform this dynamic in favor of local development.

Source: OECD (2012). OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2012. Paris: OECD Publishing. 426p.

October 2012, “The automobile shock” by Denis Langlet and Dimitri Uzunidis

One of the industrial highlights in summer 2012 was the announcement of the automotive group PSA’s (Peugeot) restructuring plan. Although the fall in sales in the first half of 2012 – from 5 to 14% according to the categories of vehicle – has been evoked, it cannot explain a plan of such magnitude: 10 000 job cuts and closures of factories. The deepening of the crisis in the global car industry comes simultaneously with the subprime crisis and the collapse of global demand. In 2008, global production of light vehicles fell by 20% to reach 55 million units. As in real estate, the contraction of the mass of creditworthy clients as a result of the restrictive wage policies and the millions job losses around the world forms the basis of this crisis of overproduction, which in turn stimulates industrial partnerships and brings together the manufacturers in order to achieve economies of scale and to reduce costs. With the 2012 PSA plan, we are entering a new phase of global restructuring of this industrial sector which is directly caused by the financial markets with their well-known requirements: a high and secured return on investment. PSA could not guarantee a satisfactory return to investors due to, according to the consulting firms, an inadequate business model. Idem for Toyota, but not for Carlos Ghosn’ Renault.

Thus, the business model that matches the requirements of the markets is the one that provides the best return to shareholders regardless of the human, social and industrial cost in any country. Assisted by the audit firms, just as rating agencies in relation to the issue of debt, financial markets speculate against the automotive industry with the same method as for sovereign debt. PSA’s shares fell from more than € 60 in 2007 to € 6.199 in early September 2012 which led to its recent exit from the CAC40. At the same time, the share price Toyota Group lost 57% of its value in five years. This market share collapse does not match the sales of the two groups which are significantly higher over the same period. While investment banks are trying to impose their criteria of profitability, a consulting firm, the Boston Consulting Group, in the report “Made in America, again,” estimates that within five years, the labor cost in some U.S. states will be equivalent to China. Although this forecast is based on the observation of significant wage rises in China, this result is largely due to the collapse of wages and social benefits to the USA. It is worthy highlighting that the automaker Ford has retransferred 2 000 jobs to the United States as part of an agreement with the UAW (United Auto Workers), allowing the company to hire workers at $ 14 per hour (gross salary). This business model based solely on the immediate financial returns to “anonymous” investors is itself the cause of the crisis notably by accentuating the poverty.

This short-sighted model is also to blame for the unfortunate and ineffective choices of industrial policy: the French state provides aids to car industry which in reality reinforce their business routine. Diversification of production and technological breakthroughs (spreading the products’ range, reducing the environmental impact, replacing the engine and materials, redesigning the modes of transport, innovating in the models of travel methods, etc.) require time, money and… new business models. Today, the global automotive industry follows three ways: the diversification of the range, the industrial alliances, and (incidentally) the multiplication of breakthroughs in prototype. The third way remains curiously marginal for years. While the first two are validated by the rating agencies; the third is – financially – unproved.

September 2012, “Entrepreneur-centered economic development” By Antonin MICHELET

Public policies of economic development in particular those at local level are relatively new concept. It has been developing rapidly since 2000s with the upsurge of the groupings of municipalities, the association of local authorities, conurbations and urban districts. Under the context of grouping and cooperation, the lawmaker took care to make compulsory the competence of economic development to local authorities. For many of the intermunicipal authorities, this new concept led them to a phase to master and to appropriate the idea, to define a sound strategy before passing to action.

The expertise in strengthening the capacity and quality to host new companies and making available land and human resources has quickly become highly sought led by the corporate tax as well as stimulated by the heightened territorial competition. To make the territory attractive, to offer the lowest taxes, to facilitate the research for real estate, human resources and sub-contractors have become the guideline of services of economic development. In order to attract mature companies in expansion, they need to develop efficient know-how, expertise and tools.

To use these knowledge and experiences on the young companies and the entrepreneurs to benefit from their growth is a recent idea. Most of the municipalities answered with a hosting service such as incubators in the first place. Laterly, they also proposed basic services on business plan. However, these offers have lost their attraction as the rent increased due to the financial pressure on the municipality and the advice requested became more and more specialized and personalized.

The essential issue to build an “entrepreneur-centered” strategy is not only to propose attractive offers; it is as much to build up the flow of projects not only issued from the territory but also those likely to be realized on it.

The Entrepreneur-centered Economic Development approach focuses on how, from the local authority’ point of view, such flow can be created and managed. This raises the question of the appropriateness of the territory, the demographic factors and the economic dynamics.

This stimulation of the territory’s entrepreneurship is based on five pillars: the detection/awareness-raising of projects, the delivery of high added value services, the networking of entrepreneurs and stakeholders, the promotion of attractiveness, and the strategic management.

These are in some way the tools and know-hows developed to attract companies from distant locations. The competition between urban communities became harsher due to the even larger globalization. Nevertheless, to stimulate entrepreneurship is a winning endogenous strategy since in its early years, a young company experiences robust growth and job creation which will decrease rapidly with the age of the company (Tim Kane Kauffman Foundation, 2010). The continuous renewal of the economic fabric should thus be a central element of the strategy of economic development without neglecting the tools residential opportunities and growth.

For more information: www.territoire-entrepreneurial.fr
Kane, Tim, Juillet 2010 “ The importance of startups in job creation and job destruction », Kauffman Foundation

Translation: Zeting Liu

August 2012, “Revisiting Sectoral Innovation Systems”, by Ludovic Temple (Cirad) and Jean Marc Touzard (Inra), UMR Innovation

The concept of the Innovation System (IS) has been used, specified and criticised since the end of the 1980s by an increasing number of researchers as well as public policy-makers in the field of innovation. For researchers, the concept aims to encapsulate the institutional dynamics and the networks or systems of players influencing the innovation process in a given space. In the field of public action, the term IS covers the desire to organise the relationships between institutions and players with a view to accelerating technological changes within a political sphere. However, ever since the very first definitions were put forward by Freeman (1987), Lundvall (1992) and Nelson (1993), the concept of IS has been buffeted by different theoretical influences (evolutionist, regulationist, neo-institutionalist, managerial, etc.), different uses (descriptive, analytical, heuristic, normative, etc.) and different scopes of application (country, region, sector, corporate network, etc.). Globally speaking, the approaches share a (more or less pronounced) institutionalist, cognitive and systemic vision of innovation which is thus situated in and part of varying social relations and rules according to the geographical and historical contexts (Amable et al. 2002). Approaches are also divided between a restricted vision of an IS confined to the institutions and networks influencing or dedicated to innovation (referring more to the context of the innovation process) and a broader vision encompassing the innovation and learning processes (referring here to an innovation and production system).

During the 1990s, the analysis of the sectoral dynamics of innovation joined the corpus of works on IS, as illustrated by the summary published by Franco Malerba (2002), the first to lay claim to the concept of the “Sectoral Innovation System” (SIS). A SIS comprises a group of institutions, organisations and networks (interconnected) which influence the production of new knowledge and innovation in a particular sector. This sectoral version of the concept of IS can be seen as a logical step in the exploration of the economic and political fields of potential application of the concept of IS, initially established at national level. This evolution has been observed for other concepts, for example in works on the Theory of Regulation whereby the “institutional mechanisms”, the sectoral version of national institutional forms, orient the mechanisms of innovation in a particular sector (Du Tertre, 2002).

The term SIS has therefore been used for the past fifteen years to characterise the processes of technological innovation on a sectoral scale, analyse their institutional and cognitive determinants, assess their economic effects and identify any particularities that might exist. Examining the sectoral particularities of innovation, by considering the institutions, the networks of players and the associated learning processes, pushes us to rethink the conditions of transformation of contemporary economic activity. Are globalisation and the concentration of firms reflected by a standardisation of innovation processes or do the particular characteristics of a productive activity, of a type of product or service (defining the very notion of a sector) give rise to specific mechanisms maintaining a diversity of rhythms, rationales and social forms in the transformation of our society?

Analysing the processes of innovation based on sectoral systems is of even greater importance today as certain countries, such as France, intend to rethink and promote “productive adjustment”.

Amable, B., Barré, R., Boyer, R., 1997, Les systèmes d’innovation à l’ère de la globalisation, Paris, Economica.
Du Tertre, C., 2002, La dimension sectorielle de la régulation, in Boyer R., Saillard Y. (eds), Théorie de la Régulation : l’état des savoirs, Paris, La découverte.
Freeman, C., 1987, Technology and Economic Performance: Lessons from Japan, London, Pinter.
Lundvall, B-A. (ed.), 1992, National Innovation Systems: Towards a Theory of Innovation and Interactive Learning, London, Pinter.
Malerba, F., 2002, The sectoral system of innovation and production, Research Policy, 31: 247-264.
Nelson, R. (ed.), 1993, National Innovation Systems. A Comparative Analysis, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press.

July 2012, “Social entrepreneurship, a promising future”, by Laurice ALEXANDRE-LECLAIR

“Social entrepreneurship can be defined as a profit or nonprofit venture with sustainable and social purposes, through social innovation and participatory governance” The main objective is to focus on social value settlement rather than financial value. Indeed, managers and employees working in this field accept a limited personal profit making for the benefit of the company. In fact, a big part of profits are reallocated in order to help the company growing and recruiting more employees. The social entrepreneurship was born in The United States in the 90s, with the launch of the program “Social Enterprise Initiative” by Harvard Business School, followed by Columbia, Yale, and diverse foundations which set up programs of training and support for the social entrepreneurs. In Europe, it is as well in the 90s that the social entrepreneurship is born in Italy at first which creates a specific status of “social cooperatives” to answer needs not or badly satisfied by public services. New entrepreneurial dynamics with social purposes emerged in this period in the other European countries (Italy, Belgium, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Spain) (The white book “to develop the social entrepreneurship”, 2011). In France, social entrepreneurship is part of the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) counting for about 10% of jobs, 215,000 employer businesses, and more than 100,000 jobs created each year.

SSE sector is composed of incorporated associations, cooperatives, mutual insurance companies, and foundations. These structures are defined by their status as groups of people rather than capital (National Observatory of Social and Solidarity Economy, 2012). The average size of a venture in SSE sector is 11 employees, against 9 employees for private sector. These figures show the growth of the sector and its role in the development of employment (2.4% in 2008 against 1.8% for the private sector). Most of businesses are in the services sector especially for incorporated associations, mutual insurance companies, and foundations, they concern the majority of employees, while cooperatives are mainly engaged in production activities: industry, construction, and agriculture. We note finally that in France, women employment prevails in the social economy and amounts to 66%. According to the GEM study (2011), women’s participation in the SSE varies by country. So, in Lebanon, Malaysia, Russia, Iceland and Argentina, women are more present in social entrepreneurship. In the USA, Finland, and China, the participation of men/women is almost equal. While in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Brazil, and Bosnia it is mostly men who are involved in social entrepreneurship. The same study reveals that more education level is high most individuals make commitment in social entrepreneurship, particularly in Europe.

Social entrepreneurship is thus a growing international practice based on solidarity and deep willing to work on social causes and develop economy. However, economic models of social enterprises are not strictly economic. They are part of a plural economy, mobilizing the public, businesses, and citizens in a variety of configurations (White book “how to develop social entrepreneurship”, 2011). Furthermore it is difficult to measure the social performance of Social entrepreneurship or rather the ROI of social entrepreneurship (ROISE). For that reason, the white book proposes to measure the social impact of an action by valuing in monetary terms the relationship between the budgets dedicated to the social actions and social contributions it has generated on the territory where it was introduced. Finally, when social entrepreneurship is concerned by social innovation, it would be appropriate to develop the social R & D as well as technological R&D.

June 2012, “The dividends of innovation”, by Marian WIELEZYNSKI

Linking dividends and innovation can be understood in a broad sense when talking about the “benefits” of development of productive forces. This is how one speaks in the literature, about the “dividends of Peace” or “dividends of Progress.”

However, economists stand out in this sense too general, and hold a narrower and more technical meaning, but do not use it that often. The term “dividend” appears only very rarely in the history of economic thought. Aggregates “profit” or “surplus” or even “gain”, adapt more easily to the analysis of “efficiency” of the specific company.

It is regrettable that this quantity, the dividend, observable from the “great discoveries” of the fifteenth century, issued from the maritime trade, has been neglected. It was probably considered too trivial in that time.

But today, with the financialization of the economy and the rise of share ownership, including by employees and state representatives, to claim the dividend takes on a harsh and even greedy behavior.

To better situate the dividend in relation to innovation, the question of its origin deserves more than ever to be asked. Thus it should be noted that dividends are calculated from the profit recorded during the previous period of production and it follows their unavailability during that period, from the consumption side, to take part in the General Equilibrium with the production. The latter, therefore could not exhaustively create the former.

To enable the Supply and Demand to balance, it is necessary to make advances, especially in the form of interim dividends.

And to replenish these deposits and advances during the production period, the contractor must … innovate.

All Entrepreneurs open markets to each other this way, paying in advance the profits they hope to achieve. In other words, they hope to attract to their own innovations those advances the business community paid from the ongoing of the sale of products, systems and services on global markets. When they succeed, entrepreneurs and innovators find that the real profits are in line with expected profits.

Otherwise, the production stops. This is unfortunately the case if such advances are used to purchase financially unsafe securities, at the expense of products, systems and innovative services. These badly allocated interim dividends can no longer be available again in the dividend payment. They then lead, in their evaporation, the innovations where they stem from and with which they disappear.

May 2012, “The social economy enterprise, potential for innovations”, by Nathalie Ferreira

Initially, the social economy is deployed as an alternative model of social organization. It appeared in the heart of the 19th century with the constitution of the first associations of cooperative type and the self-organization of workers. Today, faced with excesses of capitalism, there has been a re-emergence solidarity and cooperative practices somewhere on the border of sectors public and private, and opening so a new way in economic management and organization of work. These social and solidarity economy initiatives are a vibrant third sector and are of social innovations, including participation of workers and democracy.

Over these two past decades, this situation is observable across the world. Indeed, the digging of the phenomena of insecurity, social exclusion, poverty is accompanied by global development new social practices (popular economy, fair trade, solidarity finance, social money, sustainable development) replying to new social demands, new needs. The most significant examples are the protection of the environment, support of disabled and elderly people, and the vocational rehabilitation of inmates. These initiatives then allow people to rearrange the Interior market of the capitalist economic system on a basis of solidarity, proximity and democracy.

Social economy enterprises are therefore a kind of “laboratory of innovation and experimentation social economy of new social practices”. But this observation raises the question of the superiority of social economy enterprises innovation to classic enterprises. Contrary, to what say some economists, the answer is not itself. Indeed, an increasing number of private sector enterprises engaged in recent years in the way of social responsibility (by investing in ethical funds, for example), the excesses of globalization showing of new concepts, such as social responsibility enterprises and the corporate citizen. Today, a growing number of classic enterprises (multinationals, large corporations and SMEs) promote social responsibility strategies and contribute to social goals and to the protection of the environment. With the development of these new entrepreneurial approaches, it becomes thus more difficult draw perfectly sealed borders between the enterprises considered classic, and those of the social and solidarity economy.

Nevertheless, the social economy enterprise is originally a matrix from which innovation can arise in at least three directions. First, the social economy innovation by giving some relatively dominated actors, with access to the power of the entrepreneur, undertaking projects that they could achieve individually. Second, the activities are implemented also new because it’s necessary but neglected activity by the State or the market. Third, the rules of operation are also unpublished in the world of production of goods or services as they both cover the grouping of people and the enterprise of even their report under the terms of the membership and activity. Thus, if the social economy enterprise can be seen as innovative, it is essentially because it involves interaction since its creation, a group of people and a enterprise capable of mobilizing financial and human resources to produce goods or services. “Undertake otherwise” is not a simple view of the spirit but a reality!

April 2012, “BYOD: a step closer to a capitalism without employees”, by Serge LE ROUX

For more than half a century, technological innovation, born with the electronics revolution is continuously renewing all by going through some major breaks, such as that of the invention of personal computers or internet. With every major invention, the companies and their employees’ lives as well as the daily life of individuals are more or less disrupted. With every major invention, emerge new organizational shapes, leading to a redistribution of strategies and to a new ranking of dominant firms.

If we take a global look on this period, we can affirm that capitalism has profoundly changed. Fundamental changes have indeed occurred: the valorization perimeters protected by the national political boundaries have been removed by a global area of confrontation; within the agency theory we see that the shareholders are being emancipated from production and being more and more locked up into an extreme financial bubble; employees around the whole world are in competition, etc. A new capitalism is being built and, as we know since Schumpeter, this creation is being occurred through the destruction of the existent: shortening of the place of States, erasing the role of management, wilting of the salary status.

As for the last point, we have seen the labor force status being questioned over the last few decades: marginalization of the salary ratio, the emergence and the increase of different forms of individualism of the salary relationships, the occurrence of the obligation to get results within the modes of labor force management modes (working in project modes, leadership, agility, flexibility, collective and individual autonomy, collaborative and cooperative work, remote working, …), increase of non-salary legal status (entrepreneurship, autoentrepreneur).

In this trend, a new organizational form has just appeared: the BOYD (Bring Your Own Device). Taking into consideration the large diversity of the digital tools on the market, the enterprises offer to their employees the possibility to use their own equipment at work rather than those of the enterprise. This innovation is associated to another one which is the workshifting. Its principle is: work wherever you want whenever you want.

Theoretically, these innovations could revive some old debates about the post-capitalism: the transition process towards the socialist system implied the “failing of the State” and the “abolition of the wage labor”. Ironically, these consequences are being realized also by the capitalism! By the way, the future remains to be reinvented again.

March 2012, “Institutional environment and innovation in Europe: what is the status of the Community Patent?”, by Alfredi Ilardi and Blandine Laperche

For the 20 last years, the innovation policy has concentrated on the construction and the improvement of national innovation systems. The focus has particularly been on the implementation of an institutional environment giving incentives to the building of interactions between actors (SMEs, big firms, universities and research centers), in order to increase the performance of innovation processes. At the European level, the building of such an institutional environment faces the fragmentation of national rules of the game. The difficulties of the building of a patent (often considered as the “par excellence” incentive tool), common to the countries of the European Community illustrate the incompleteness of the European system of innovation and of the induced costs. The European Commission thus considers that obtaining a patent protection for the 27 member states costs 15 times more compared to the US, mainly due to translation and procedure costs. The lower European performance (EU 27) in innovation compared to the US, Japan and South Korea (as shown in the most recent Innovation Union Scoreboard 2011, released in February 2012) would find here one of its explanation.

The idea of establishing a regional patent system valid in the member States of the European Communities (today, the European Union) started developing soon after the conclusion of the Rome Treaty in 1957 and followed parallel initiatives at multilateral level in Europe. However, after several negative results, including the preparation of the Convention for the European Patent for the Common Market (1975) which was never ratified, it was only in 2000 that the EEC Commission presented a proposal for a Council Regulation on the Community Patent. It proposed the creation of a Community patent which would coexist with national patents and with European patents under the European Patent Convention (EPC) (1973) and would be granted by the European Patent Office (EPO) with effect in the entire Community.

This proposal has been the subject of extensive discussions and difficult negotiations and produced between 2003 and 2010 several revised texts which however did not meet the unanimous consensus of the delegations of the member States. The main obstacle consisted in the so called “translation arrangements”, proposing that the Community patent would be granted by the EPO in one of the EPO official languages (English, French and German) and published in that language with a translation of the claims in the other two languages. The Spanish and Italian delegations argued that, with a national language other than the three EPO languages, this translation arrangement would create a distortion on the market, slow the diffusion of scientific and technical information and thus penalize their industries.

At the Council meeting in October 2010, after the withdrawal of the Italian and Spanish delegations, a group of member States declared they were ready to proceed with the establishment of a unitary patent on the basis of “enhanced cooperation”. This was confirmed at the Council meeting of November 2010. Enhanced cooperation is an exceptional measure, very rarely adopted, regulated by Article 20 of the Treaty on the European Union (TEU) and Articles 326 to 334 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Under these provisions, a number of member States may establish among themselves, with the exclusion of others, enhanced cooperation when it is established that no other alternative exists to attain the objectives of the cooperation by all member States within a reasonable period of time. A total of 25 member States have requested enhanced cooperation in the field of unitary patent protection.

Another controversial issue was the features of the patent court system having jurisdiction on infringement and validity matters for EU and European patents. In March 2009, the Commission proposed the text of an international treaty on the creation of a European and EU Patents Court (EEUPC) among EU member States and member States of the EPC not members of the EU. However, in March 2011, the Court of Justice of the EU issued an opinion stating that the proposed Treaty was not compatible with the EU law since the interpretation and application of the EU law would be carried out by the EEUPC, a body outside the framework of the EU.

At present, the preparatory works for the adoption of EU unitary patent protection system progress on two fronts. On the one hand, with the preparation of two Council Regulations implementing enhanced cooperation, respectively, in the area of the creation of unitary patent protection and with regard to translation arrangements; on the other, with the redrafting of an instrument on the jurisdictional system which would take into account the opinion expressed by the EU Court of Justice.

The long awaited conclusion of these complex negotiations is still to come. If it results in an agreement on this unitary patent with 25 member States, we could however raise the issue of its impact: will it participate to the creation of a unified institutional environment or will it add some complexity to the current system of invention protection in Europe (where national and European patent already coexist)?

February 2012, “Innovation and R&D in Computer Industry”, by Philippe Batsale

The innovative effort of companies may be measured by the amount available for expenditure on R & D. This data is a variable frequently included in many models. It is also the subject of an annual ranking for all sectors: for firms in the computer industry Microsoft (fourth) and IBM (6th) held the first places, one can see further, but well away Google ( 34 th) or Apple (70th). Facebook is not even on the list.

More interesting, Booz & Company asks its respondents to name the firms they “feel” the most innovative and provides a table which compares the rankings of reputation and the actual figures of expenditure on R & D. We find then unsettling singularities. First, the computer industry has won all the votes, it is seen by everyone in the first position, although in reality, the pharmaceutical industry is first in terms of expenditure on R & D. Then, regarding the computer industry, the hierarchy is reversed. Apple is first, of course, in innovative reputation. Google is the second, Microsoft and IBM are 5th and 6th. Even Facebook appears in 10th place, while the firm has no reported amounts of R & D. How is it possible that highly innovative firms have only low budgets for R & D while the very large budgets (Microsoft, IBM) do not seem to shine through their visibility?

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