Why Isère innovates (for the second) greater than Morbihan | EUROtoday

From Morbihan to Isère, there are far more than 900 kilometers: the Breton division, bathed by the waters of the Atlantic, has little in frequent with its distant Rhône-Alpine cousin, resolutely mountainous. The financial panorama can also be utterly completely different: within the west, an financial system dominated by agriculture, fishing and tourism; to the east, a transparent presence of trade and know-how.

And that's not all: the 2 departments are additionally polar opposites by way of innovation, underlines Xavier Jaravel, professor on the London School of Economics. In November 2023, this researcher printed Marie Curie lives in Morbihan (editions du Seuil), a piece which explores these questions and which aroused a sure shock in Brittany, however not solely that. Morbihan, “despite a good general educational level, ranks among the bottom departments of France in terms of innovation: the rate of children expected to become engineers, researchers or to hold a thesis is among the lowest in the country”, he notes.

On the opposite hand, Isère rises to the highest of the rating, behind the Alpes-Maritimes, the place the Sophia-Antipolis know-how park. “Children from Grenoble will innovate much more than elsewhere, continues Xavier Jaravel, if only compared to those who grew up not far away, for example in Annecy. » Moreover, the share of jobs devoted to research and development (R&D) in the Grenoble conurbation is the highest in France – it stands at 7.4%, compared to 5% in Paris – and the The number of patents filed there reached a record figure of 8.3 per ten thousand inhabitants.

“The fruit of history”

How can we clarify such a niche in future between these two French areas? “ The different subjects of excellence of a territory are the fruit of history”, says Breton Pascal Le Liboux, president of AudéLor, the town planning, economic development and technology park agency for the country of Lorient.

In fact, both history and geography weighed heavily. “At the end of the 19th century^e century, Grenoble became the first industrial region in France thanks to hydroelectricity”, explains Florent Genoux, innovation delegate at the Grenoble-Alpes regional department of the public investment bank Bpifrance.

By utilizing for the primary time the hydraulic power of mountain torrents to run the machines of his paper mill, Aristide Bergès, round 1870, kicked off the event of industries on the foot of the Grenoble mountains. The system turned extra refined, with the addition of generators and bigger water pipes, offering low-cost and renewable power to paper makers, then to metallurgical or electrical energy producers.

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