By Charles Cooper
URL: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9589_22-5723120.html
Commentary--Why is it that only a handful of French companies are listed on the Nasdaq compared with more than 100 for Israel, a country with roughly one-tenth the population? The blunt truth is that France, a country with a $1.7 trillion economy, is still better known for its fromage than its technology.
I don't mean to pick on the French. Truth be told, I'm an unabashed Francophile. I love their food, adore their language and admire their culture. But when it comes to high-tech innovation, there's no escaping the fact that France does not punch its weight.
About 200,000 French men and women, graduates of their country's best technical schools, are living in the Bay Area. The Israelis may be a special case. Still, when conversations turn to technology, France regularly gets overlooked in favor of economic basket cases-turned-tigers such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, Singapore and India. Considering that the French invented the word "entrepreneur," this is a source of some irritation among the French political elite who bristle when outsiders innocently offer up the comparisons.
"There is the sense that we are old-fashioned, unproductive, too obsessed with the quality of life," said Clara Gaymard, president of the Invest in France Agency and a special representative for international investment. "France actually has a higher percentage of 20- to 29-year-olds with qualifications in science or technology than the U.S. or the U.K."
Gaymard was in Silicon Valley this week to try to puncture some of the myths she said have grown up around what has been referred to as the French Paradox.
Paradox it sure is. There's no shortage of technical ability in France--but a brain drain is hurting the company's economy. About 200,000 French men and women, graduates of their country's best technical schools, are living in the Bay Area, part of the reason there's a technology gap. However, for all of Gaymard's optimism about her country's future as a tech leader--and she was spot-on message during a two-day conference devoted to the subject of France and high-tech, the problem isn't easily given to resolution. Consider some recent history...
When France's then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin returned home from a tour of Silicon Valley in 1999, he was determined to spur job growth and innovation. One idea he pushed through was a tax cut on stock-option earnings. So far, so good. But Jospin also made government responsible for promoting industry incubators, directing seed money to tech start-ups. That's where history and political culture trump the needs of the market.
Chrysler got away with it, but when was the last time a U.S. tech company walked away with a federal bailout? There's a long history of "etatism" in France that you can trace back to the days of Mazarin and Louis XIV. So it was no shock to see the French government come to the assistance of Bull in 2002 to prevent the collapse of that one-time flagship company. There was hardly a murmur of domestic protest when the government provided a 450 million euro rescue loan. (However, the move got Paris in trouble with the then-EU competition commissioner Mario Monti. The French government announced a year later it would no longer be a stakeholder after Bull completed restructuring.)
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