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HUGE LEAP FORWARD REQUIRED BY THE NATIONAL BUDGET EFFORT
FOR INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
The situation is so serious that public
funding for research and development (R&D) devoted to
information and communication technologies (ICTs) needs
to make a huge leap forward. The usual budgetary reasoning
in terms of increase percentages to a base budget is unsuitable.
The State must deploy the necessary resources and instruments
following arbitration at the highest governmental level.
A doubling of the present public credits
(Ministries of Research, Defence and Industry) allocated
to ICTs and their applications would form a reasonable aim,
which would lead to an aggregate public share for R&D
devoted to ICTs over 5 years of approximately 17 billion
euros. This would nevertheless remain lower than the private
R&D investment, and with the latter would represent
no more than 0.5% of GDP.
Given the challenges involved, this
amount is to be placed in perspective:
* first, with the great effort made by the ICT industry,
which alone represents, in France, more than a quarter of
all the private R&D expenditure and nearly 4% of the
turnover of this industry. This effort by French industry
is on a par with the international effort and double the
European Union average. Affected by the crisis, for the
past two years however it has been stagnating or even declining;
* second, with the aim-adopted at the Lisbon European Council
in April 2002-of 3% of GDP to be devoted to R&D in all
sectors by 2010.
Further, special
attention should be paid to the regulatory and tax measures
which are to be coherent with those of our international
partners. At least two measures should be rapidly introduced:
a revision of and the removal of the cap on the research
tax credit and exemption from local business tax related
to research investments.
Such an effort
does not exceed France's financial possibilities provided
the measures are aimed at the sole ICT sector, which has
special strategic importance.
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These R&D investments
guarantee France's and Europe's future power of attraction.
We have already nearly completely lost the battle in
the field of the production of manufactured goods; we
cannot allow ourselves to also lose the brain battle.
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The projects funded should as a priority concern fields that are a direct responsibility of the public authorities: domestic security and defence, e-administration and regionalisation, education, health and the environment, because of the intrinsic importance of these topics and because they participate in the take-up by the French of ICTs and cannot be disputed by international trade rules.
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These projects should serve as a lever in allowing experimentation with innovative technologies with industrial and commercial uses.
It is therefore advisable that they result from multiannual programmes ensuring coherence and synergy between industry and public laboratories.
They should fit into a process entailing
the mastery of critical technologies and should be structured
around major topics such as: large system architecture,
infrastructure softwares, data storage and merging, network
security, network semantics and intelligence, micro and
nanosensors, interactions between people and systems, etc.
These topics cannot be defined precisely until consultation
between the major French and European players and agencies.
They should be based on the management
structure described in the Board's recommendation of 8 March
2002, comprising representatives of private and public bodies,
ensuring a genuine public/private partnership, with its
own legal personality and high-performance assessment instruments,
empowered to negotiate with our European partners and following-up
the work by the French representatives at international
standardisation bodies.
This national effort should be completed
by the opening of direct negotiations with our main European
partners in order to rapidly set up coordinated long-term
concrete actions requiring a broader framework than France
on its own. This type of cooperation is essential to defend
the position of European industry in international competition.
It should be able to be based on existing
national or international cooperative R&D programmes
such as EURÊKA (MEDEA+ as regards components and ITEA
for software), or programmes to be promoted where telecommunications
are concerned. The CELTIC (Cooperation for European sustained
Leadership in Telecommunications) project implemented in
France by Alcaltel, France Télécom and Thomson
Multimedia should be promoted and encouraged by the public
authorities.
Similarly, this effort, spearheaded
by the European Research Area, should be supported financially
as part of the European Union Framework Research and Development
Programme.
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