The previous post was about spatial planning in England, and today we’re looking across la Manche to France, and French regional innovation strategies in particular. In 2007, every one of France’s 26 regions were invited to adopt a regional innovation strategy. As the Inforegio news pages recently noted, these strategies could be used as a source of inspiration for other European regions. Before going any further, we should say that the document is available in English and French (disponible en français et en anglais, as it were). No matter which language you read it in, it is a very useful document since it provides nice summaries of the strengths and weaknesses for regions and then a set of ‘key proposals’ for each.
If you’re working on regional innovation, this is a useful summary document in a field that can be difficult to keep up with. Whether or not the proposals for each region will ever be implemented – and whether they will work – is another issue but for the time being we’re interested in what is being proposed and what the French approach to regional innovation looks like.
