French innovation funder edges closer after ministerial backing

France looks set to establish its own dedicated funder for disruptive research after a government-backed report endorsed the creation of an innovation body based on America’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).

Although an official announcement is yet to take place, senior ministers in Emmanuel Macron’s government have publicly backed the recommendations in a joint task force’s report, published on 18 June, which calls for the creation of a “dedicated ARPA-like entity” for France.

The agency should work closely with Germany’s innovation agency Sprind, established in 2019, to leverage the scientific and industrial strengths of Europe’s largest economies, advises the report, which was commissioned by France’s finance ministry and Germany’s research ministry.

Speaking at Vivatech, Europe’s largest tech conference, French finance minister Roland Lescure said the proposed agency would help retain an abundance of world-class scientific talent “found on both sides of the Rhine” that often left for US laboratories.

“To keep them here, we have to give them the ways and means to do [their research],” said Lescure, welcoming the report’s call for greater Franco-German collaboration on research and innovation.

President Macron was due to address the Paris tech conference later in the day.

“The culture of collaboration is already there but what is missing is a link between research and business,” said Lescure on the need for improve connectivity with industry – comments that were endorsed by fellow panellist Philippe Baptiste, minister for research and higher education.

According to the new report, whose task force brought together 16 experts from funding bodies and venture capital, the “new breakthrough innovation entity” for France should “start operating within months, not years”.

The agency should seek to promote research which could “achieve order-of-magnitude advances beyond the state of the art and transform them into new industries, new markets, and entirely new fields of economic activity”, it explains.

To do so, it should have “full institutional and operational autonomy, independence from political instructions or from any hierarchy or authority,” says the report on why “autonomy [must be] a non-negotiable feature of the initiative”.

Similar to Sprind and the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency, the French agency should also appoint research project managers with a high level of control who should be given “the right to allocate funds quickly on [their] conviction”, the report recommends, adding that programme managers should have a “disruptive mindset, a demonstrated capacity to take risks and full independence in their decisions”.

Managers should be exempt from civil service hiring rules to “offer industry-competitive terms”, continues the study, which recommends staff be appointed on “time-limited mission contracts of three to five years”.

The new agency is part of France 2030, a €54 billion (£47 billion) multi-year science funding scheme launched in 2021, which seeks to support research based around key “missions” deemed important to national interests, basic scientific research and entrepreneurship.

The  Arpa-like agency should also seek to ensure researchers retain intellectual property rights from research supported by public funding, with funders keeping only the minimal licensing rights required under European law.

Urging the agency’s creation, the report says cooperation with Germany’s Sprind could “constitute a change of paradigm in the way European countries design and implement disruptive innovation policies over the coming decades”.

To capitalise on France and Germany’s “world-class research capabilities and a market with sufficient scientific and industrial strength to play an active role in shaping these future technologies”, it adds, the two countries “must build the institutional capacity needed to promote joint disruptive innovation initiatives”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com