researResearch - Télécom Bretagne

h Research
9
RESEARCH
Main achievements of the project
On the whole, we have seen a growing amount of
expertise among the researchers on the UT
project. The breadth of our research network has
grown, both institutionally (Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development,
Council of Europe, Ministry of National Education)
and contractually (National Agency for Research,
Haute Autorité de Santé, Telecom Institute, region
of Brittany, Marsouin, Images and Networks
research cluster, ...).
Regulation
2008 was marked by a great deal of reform with
respect to the legal frameworks surrounding
electronic communications and audiovisual.
Analyzing the content of these reforms, as well as
what is at stake on a European scale, is at the very
heart of all the other research activities,
particularly those that deal with the area of use.
For this reason, the new community directive on
the services of audiovisual media was dealt with in
a commentary that underlines the adaptation of
the preexisting text (the directive 'Television
without borders') to the emergence of new
services and uses, particularly in the context of
the development of non-linear services or videoon-demand
services ([6]Blandin, in Journal du
Droit Européen).
With respect to the reform of the institutional
regulations regarding electronic communications,
the analysis paid particular attention to the
institutional aspects, where the stakes appear to
be especially high. Through various initiatives, the
most emblematic of which was the project to
create a European regulator, the European
Commission declared its wish to refocus the
regulations around itself and to reinforce the
power that it holds. This is particularly the case
when considering measures that national
regulators take with respect to powerful
operators, power that they would be called on to
spread to the competitive remedies imposed ([5]
Blandin, in Communications et Stratégies).
In terms of services and uses, the various projects
made it possible to find legal solutions, with the
goal of managing emerging architectures and
services, and at the same time, of moving the
reflection forward on new legal and economic
models whose formalization, and possibly
experimentation, appear necessary.
Localization
Our central research question had to do with
"industries and territories", but in the general
economic sense of the English word industry,
rather than the more precise meaning of the
French term industrie.
The research on the evaluation and analysis of the
dynamics of territorial industries in emerging
countries, particularly in China, was carried out
(Béraud, for ISMEA). Territorial industries are
defined as activities with a limited location
(limited by natural resources, institutions...). We
carried out the analysis of links between
economic dynamics, investment, and the
development of territorial industries in China,
across urban networking services. The analysis
reveals different business systems for different
types of networks.
The use of ICT often has counterintuitive effects
on the location of users, effects that are reinforced
as learning by doing complicates the models and
use scenarios. This is why we undertook an
empirical study ([3] Le Goff-Pronost, Lethiais, in
Revue d’Economie Régionale et Urbaine whose
goal was to determine whether or not the need for
geographical proximity between a business and
its partners remained one of the explanatory
factors of the agglomeration phenomenon that we
continue to observe, despite the growing diffusion
of ICT. We reached the inevitable conclusion that
these technologies are not simply tools allowing
the transfer of codified knowledge. They must also
be seen as a way to exchange information and
coordinate with one's partners remotely.
We took on the question of the information needs
of companies vs. their coordination needs in a
deeper way by studying the ICT adoption and use
behaviors of businesses located in an
environment of weak economic density (Lethiais
et al., in Revue d’économie industrielle). The goal
was to analyze the links between organizational
and environmental characteristics of rural
businesses and uses in order to demonstrate the
nature of their communication needs. The
research demonstrates that how much ICT is used
depends more on the specific characteristics of
the companies themselves than on those of their
environment. These factors differ depending on
the nature of the needs they address, whether
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