Regional Innovation Policy: Problems and Strategies in Britain and France

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Abstract
Britain's lagging economic performance is clearly tied to a failure on the part of British industry to innovate to the same extent as competitor economies. There is a spatial coincidence between the least innovative parts of Britain's innovation-poor economy and the traditionally depressed industrial regions. It has been suggested in government and academia that one way to help overcome both the problem of innovation lag and that of regional industrial decline is for Britain to adopt a regional innovation policy. In this paper the case for this is discussed in the context of the regional problem and in terms of problems posed by a market-led innovation process. A critical evaluation of one possible form of regional innovation policy based on the decentralisation of government research and development as carried out in France since the 1950s is presented. It is concluded that neither the present British nor French approaches are ideal but that some regionalised combination of them could be an improvement.