Innovation and Industrial Policies

Introduction

Over the past 20 years, expanding globalization and the development of information and communication technologies have contributed significantly to the idea that innovation is now the key to business’ competitiveness and the growth process of contemporary economies. However, at the same time, constraints created by the internationalization of value chains have gradually transformed controversy over international company relocations into a more alarming debate on the de-industrialization of the French economy (Fontagné and Lorenzi 2005). In addition to the problem of whether such a phenomenon of “industrial disengagement” is “a reality or a statistical chimera” (Cohen and Buigues 2014, p. 17), this debate was exacerbated by the 2008 crisis, the effects of which, first financial and then economic, largely contributed to discredit the idea that markets are still efficient, to the extent that any public intervention in the economic field could only be useless at best, at worst dangerous. Indeed, many economists consider that the crisis has largely demonstrated that markets are not necessarily efficient and the literature makes the argument that without strong government intervention in the industrial sector, market economies could collapse (Stiglitz et al. 2013).

This convergence of views leads not only to justifying the introduction of incentives for innovation, and therefore a genuine innovation policy, but above all to call for a return to industrial policy. It ...