Repenser les politiques d’innovation en France ?

While French governments devote, for twenty years, many efforts to drive innovation, performances in this area are not as vibrant as in other countries of the European Union. This finding is supported by a first inventory that attempts to identify the many public instruments in place, supposed to correct market failures. It appears that besides the market failures, the existence of different institutional failures cannot be dismissed. Among them are various barriers to innovation, such as citizen?s distrust, bad educational performance, gap between the academic world and the corporate activity, and excessive weight given to incumbent insiders, at the expense of start-up outsiders in the business side, and to employees holding a permanent contract at the expense of young unemployed in the labor market. These features lead to consider a different role of the state, not only correcting market failures but also creating social opportunities to benefit from the digital age. Various avenues are being explored, including the development of social innovations in business and wellbeing, supporting more collective cohesion, and a more substantive logic of usage to replace the usual property rights.