This project aims to develop theoretical and empirical researches on the critical determinants of regional resilience, and to produce some renewed policy implications for the European knowledge economy. Contemporary economic systems are featured by a high rate of technological cycles and an increasing range of demand-driven innovations. As a result, new business and consumer paradigms have emerged around eco-innovation, biotechnology, photonics and embedded systems for mobility and transport. At the same time, contemporary economic systems are characterized by a high level of internationalisation, chronic macro-economic instability and an increasing awareness of environmental challenges, so that regions that succeed in developing these emerging technological fields expect to be more successful in benefiting from new opportunities for growth through resilience. The project deals with these trends by developing an evolutionary framework of regional resilience that facilitate understanding of how markets, technologies and territories co-evolve in a highly open and unstable economic environment. This project is proposed by leading research centres of expertise from the four countries of the ORA call for proposal, each of which has considerable past experience of collaborative research within the fields of Economic Geography, the Knowledge Economy and cluster policies. The research program will focus on the identification of the relevant conditions of regional resilience. Technological variety, knowledge recombination and evolving territorial networks will be at the heart of this identification process. In particular, a key research question is whether growth through ‘related variety’ is preferable for reasons of diversity and inter-sectoral innovation opportunities, than that based upon ‘specialisation’ in specific high-demand technologies. From an evolutionary perspective, new branching processes and knowledge relatedness depend upon the ability of knowledge networks to evolve and avoid lock-in effects. The structural properties of networks will be studied in order to show that some of them favour related variety and the emergence of new technological fields, as well as some organizations and governance structures play a specific role in regional resilience. This framework will be tested through quantitative and qualitative empirical assessments. Using social network analysis and econometric models, quantitative assessments on technological relatedness at the European level will allow us to identify resilient regions in the above-mentioned emerging technological fields. Some of these leading places will be investigated through a qualitative assessment based on detailed biographies of the knowledge dynamics at work in the selected territories.

Starting from the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, our aim is to quantify the value of biodiversity as a device for the prevention of zoonoses in order to understand how the preservation of biodiversity should enter the policy mix to be implemented to prevent and mitigate epidemics. We propose to assess the probability of emergence of an infectious disease as a function of biodiversity. We then propose to incorporate this function in a macroeconomic model to compute the optimal trade-off between biodiversity preservation and economic growth. From this modeling, we evaluate the insurance value of biodiversity against epidemics outbreaks. Our work aim to understand how this value depends on public policy parameters such as risk aversion and aversion to fluctuations but also on ethical parameters.

TKC project aims to improve our understanding of the way in which highly skilled migrants activate their social networks and leverage their role as international gatekeepers, and to what extent they contribute to solve cross-border information and agency problems. TKC’s working hypothesis is that highly skilled workers can be regarded as national or ethnic as well as professional diasporas, which create trust and pass information over long distances, thus reducing international transaction costs. We also consider their role in the diffusion of technical knowledge, as documented in both the historical literature and recent economic and sociological scholarship. TKC is a theoretical and empirical project, whose deliverables will consist in research papers and open access datasets. It is also a project centred on policy-relevant issues, whose ambition is to enrich the debate on migration on a global scale, but especially in Europe and France, where the dominant focus on low skilled or refugee immigration both obscures the importance of highly skilled flows and contributes to negative stereotyping. TKC will be articulated in six work-packages, as follows: WP.1. Global talent flows: a theoretical review WP.2. Global talent flows: stylized facts WP.3. Highly skilled migration and the internationalization of science and technology WP.4. Highly skilled migrants and firms’ internationalization WP.5. Ethnic networks and the international diffusion of ideas WP.6. Coordination and dissemination TKC takes a complementary approach between the macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis. It tests the hypotheses at the aggregate country level in WP.3 (macro); then it incorporates the role of the firm in WP.4 (meso); and finally it goes down to the role of the individual, high-skilled migrant in WP.5 (micro). TKC’s research topic stands at the cross-roads of different disciplinary approaches, ranging from the geography of innovation, the economics of migration, and international business studies. All of them can re-examined within the general theoretical framework of diaspora economics. TKC has a strong engagement towards collecting micro-data concerning specific categories of very highly skilled workers, such as inventors or executives, with the migrant status to be ascertained by available biographic information and/or name analysis. These data may both provide a suitable and interesting alternative to more classic data sources, both because of their detail and for their pointing at homogenous professional groups, rather than generically tertiary educated workers.

Economists, as well as policy-makers, agree nowadays that university-generated knowledge contributes decisively to the economic growth of nations and local economies. The Bayh-Dole Act introduced in the US in the early 80's, was the key policy initiative aimed at encouraging the commercialization of academic research results. Many observers suggest that the recent technological success of the USA owes a lot to this new “commercial model” of university technology transfer. Similar reforms have now been initiated in many advanced countries and most research universities and public research organizations have set up technology transfer offices (TTOs) which commercialize academic knowledge and manage the rights. France in particular, has adopted a series of policy reforms progressively introducing this new model, aiming at improving the social and economic returns of academic research. We show in this proposal, thanks to a first investigation of the French data that we intend to expand and reliabilize in this project, that if public patenting has significantly raised in the last decade (up to 14% of all patent families in 2012), it is mainly due to a sharp modification in the ownership structure of academic patents that is accompanied by a contrasted evolution of their quality indicators. These first results stress a series of interesting questions that we will address in this project. Are traditional academic incentives aligned with this new goal of contributing to technology transfer? Are the different scenarios of technology transfer associated with different levels of effectiveness, and if so, why? What are the impacts of the recent changes of the legislation and of new policy instruments on technology transfer? To answer these questions, we need to rely on a consistent micro-economic understanding of the new commercial model of university technology transfer, at the interplay between the three typical actors of the transfer: the professor (or researcher), the TTO and the company. On the empirics side, we need to rely on very recent, and very complete data. Therefore, we will match, at the professor and researcher level, individual information, patent data, publication data and project funding data. To some extent, France will be considered as a case study in itself. No such precise and complete empirical analysis has already been performed in any large industrialized country. A survey of academic inventors, interviews of TTO CEOs, as well as case studies on the Bordeaux and Strasbourg sites will complement our information when national wide data are not available. So as to contribute to the policy debate on technology transfer, we will identify the impact of policy initiatives which target only some part of the reference population and evidence the differential behavior of “treated” and their controls. We will also expand our investigations to the European level and exploit cross-country policy variations in time. Our goal is to provide robust policy recommendations to improve (tentatively optimize) university technology transfer. The team members are experts on the issue of academic patenting and technology transfer. They are spread over four sites, but many of them have already collaborated in the past. The cohesiveness of the team, including the strong reliability of the connection with the OST (as data provider) will ensure a timely execution of the project. New collaborations will also be undertaken, by matching, in this project, expertises on microeconomic theory, professional practices, applied micro-econometrics, identification techniques for observational data, and different data collection methods. The project should, in addition, significantly contribute to building a strong French research base on university technology transfer, in connection with policy makers, practitioners and students.

The FARM_VALUE project’s objective is to contribute to scientific knowledge and to provide new perspectives to farm stakeholders and policy-makers on farm transfers, focusing specifically on the role of the value of the farm in this process. The project aims at carrying for the first time in the literature a thorough assessment of how the value of a farm is assessed, both from economic and sociological points of view, and how both points of view can (or should) be fully integrated in the context of farm transfer. Studying the issue with both economic and sociological perspectives has never been done so far to our knowledge, although this is of high value for this particular issue: generally, the farm value used during transfers by professional stakeholders is given by economic or financial metrics; however, the latter do not account for sociological value (e.g. the fact that the farm assets are family assets), which may be so high that it prevents transfer. More specifically, we aim at (1) updating the current state of the art on farm value and suggesting methodological extensions or alternatives in particular from finance; (2) considering the diversity of components in a farm value, and in particular farm intangible assets, whether these are economic aspects (such as the role of the farm in a territory, managerial skills, payment rights or contracts) or sociological aspects (such as professional knowledge); (3) linking the value of a farm to its transfer, by analysing farmers' wealth accumulation strategies, transferred farms' performance, and the way shares are valued in partnership farms. The empirical application is to France, and in particular on dairy and beef cattle farming in three regions, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and Bretagne. The dairy and beef cattle sector has been chosen here since it is particularly affected by succession problems: high farm value due to animals as well as buildings and machinery associated to the animals; hence, high transfer cost; low attractiveness due to hard working conditions implied by the care of animals day and night; and by contrast low profitability. The three main regions have been selected as they present various economic environments as well as different cultural heritage and social values. On a methodological point of view, we will make use of existing economic data that are little exploited for this issue, such as the French Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and the European Household Finance and Consumption Survey. We will also perform a survey to hundreds of farmers to complement these data, as well as semi-directive interviews that allow account for personal ties between partners in a collective farm, and family ties over several generations.