University-industry relationships and regional innovation systems: Analysis of the French procedure cifre

Abstract

This chapter aims at understanding the role of universities at the level of territory, or "region", that is, as a sub-national entity. A considerable amount of the economic literature and a number of policy-oriented papers have been devoted to university-industry relationships and regional innovation systems. However, little has been done on looking at the links between university and the regional industrial fabric. We address this gap drawing on a database of contractual PhD research projects involving private firms and public laboratories. Since 1981, there has been a system in operation in France, under the auspices of the French government, which enables doctoral research students to conduct their research partly in a public research laboratory and partly in a firm. This collaborative arrangement, called Cifre (Convention industrielle de formation par la recherche), is a public-private research training agreement. The PhD student's time is split between the laboratory and the firm. The students are recruited by firms, which receive a subsidy from the public agency that oversees the Cifre arrangements, the Association Nationale de la Recherche Technique (ANRT). Thus, the student becomes involved in both the industry and scientific communities. He/she could be seen as a "cognitive platform" facilitating the creation and transfer of knowledge between science and industry. This role is particularly important in relation to small firms for which working with a Cifre sponsored PhD student is often their first contact with academia. If the experience is a good one there is the possibility that the relationship with the academic world will continue. One of the objectives of this system is to bridge between the scientific and industrial spheres, and to build durable networks involving business and academic institutions. In relation to the students involved the objective is to encourage and facilitate their integration into the labour market. It has been shown that the transition from being at a university to getting a job has been significantly easier for Cifre trainees. In this chapter we will compare the regional distribution of the laboratories and firms involved in the Cifre scheme to see to what extent this transfer of knowledge between universities and firms is confined to regions or takes place in the broader context of the national system. In other words, we are investigating the notion of a regional system of innovation (RSI). Certain regions would appear to be self-sufficient in the sense that their firms often collaborate with local academic institutions. However, many regions appear to be "knowledge exporting", because their local scientific specialization is more aligned to industry in other regions, while some regions can be classed as "knowledge importing" because the firms within their region are forced to collaborate on scientific projects with institutions outside their territory, because they lack the relevant competence or it is not available in their immediate area. Our study will illustrate the variety of regional innovation contexts that are involved. Only a small number of local regions encompass the array of actors and links that are involved in the innovation process: large and smaller enterprises in relationships with universities and public research institutes, "knowledge intensive business services" (KIBS), which capitalize on and diffuse technological knowledge and managerial skills among the other organizations, regional authorities capable of implementing (in coordination with national administrations) the relevant policies, etc. In short, few regions have a RSI, although many of them have important elements of such a system. In this chapter we focus mainly on one aspect of the innovation system: university-industry collaboration, but our analysis casts light on the regional context in general and leads to a consideration of the specific role of KIBS. In Section 1 we begin by defining a regional innovation system and describing the role of university-industry collaboration within such a learning environment. In the second section we describe the French doctoral training system-Cifre. Finally we construct regional indicators using statistical data on Cifre in order to analyze the differences between regions in terms of science-industry collaborations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.