Activity Report 2010 - CNRS

OVERVIEW
was made operative in only three months
which is an exceptionally short timeframe.
In addition the Steering Committee of
NanoINNOV pays attention to support
programs directed to societal issues:
societal acceptability, science
dissemination,… taking into account the
diversity of publics, using different
approaches to introduce debates with
citizens.
NanoINNOV had a very good start,
fostered in a very short time an effective
strategy and instruments to implement it.
However national issues, (The Grenelle
for Environment, and the GDPN standing
for ‘National Grand Public Debate’) arose
and crashed into this “French NNI”
program.
The GDPN, badly driven, introduced the
debate with ‘a hypothetic grand public”
mimicking what has been termed
“participative democracy”, adopting the
format of TV-oriented talk show, to trace
“reality”. This format was very suited to
give the stage to the most vocal groups
of opponents to nanotechnology which
denied the basic principles of democracy
by killing dialog in the nest.
Beside this cultural context, nanosciences
and nanotechnologies certainly find
themselves in the frontline of another
recent important shift in science funding
policies. In many countries, one’s seeing
a shift in emphasis in the aims of publicly
funded science, away from narrowly
discipline-based objectives, and towards
goals defined through societal needs,
partly because research has become
eligible for political TV-related dramatic
speeches. This context, beneficial in
terms of global money generates drastic
transformations of the operative modes
with a time constant much smaller than
that used for scientific discoveries.
NanoINNOV surely was innovative in
terms of objectives (limited targets at the
beginning) fast start of the operation,
and original steering committee mixing
Scientists, Technologists, and companies
CTOs. Unfortunately it came to its end,
after a difficult birth which occurred too
late with an almost 10 years delay.
Investissements d’Avenir
Within the context
described above, the
“Investissements d’Avenir”
initiative was launched in
the middle of 2010.
It kept scientists and technologists in a
six month-long brainstorming and
project-making and eventually gave birth
to a double series of proposals designed
to acquire large set of shared equipments
(EQUIPEX) and to benefit from new
supports given to implement more
integrated managements of the scientific
and technological programs carried out at
a large scale (LABEX).
Both call for proposals requested to
conceive a deeper local integration of
Research and R&D groups in order to
interlink them into the virtuous chain:
Basic Science-R&D-Innovation-Transfer.
Similar instruments of the research policy
had previously – and successfully - been
implemented and supported by the
neighboring companies (years 2005-
2006: Pôles de compétitivité and Carnot
Institutes).
To make the story short let us describe
briefly only the successful Labex “LANEF”
(Laboratory of Alliances on Nanosciences-
Energies for the Future) which has been
laureate with others (MINOS,..), and is
fully relevant of the Nanosciences
Foundation’s topics.
The LANEF proposal can
actually be viewed as an
extension of the
Nanosciences Foundation
strategy - and of the
NanoINNOV strategy too.
LANEF is built as a consortium of
research groups from 5 laboratories:
three of them, INAC, Institut
Néel, and LP2MC fully relevant of the
Nanosciences Foundation
LNCMI (Grenoble High Magnetic
Field Laboratory) is partly involved in the
Nanosciences Foundation
G2ELab, (Grenoble Electrical
Engineering Laboratory) which is lightly
involved in the Nanosciences Foundation,
and mostly implicated with Institut Néel
as project bearer, because of their long
term collaborations. However G2ELab has
a huge expertise in a large number of
energy-related issues partly casted in
important patents, and has carried out
strong partnerships with energy
companies for years.
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