Once again, some comic relief from France. A year ago, I wrote about French efforts to create a French search engine for the Internet, a kind of Gaullist Google. The idea, presumably, was to create a search tool consistent with French rather than Anglo-Saxon values. (And I thought Google just let people find what they are looking for.)
It all sounded like a bad joke. But, according to a a report today in MIT’s Technology Review, the French government is still serious about the project, and last week made a grant to Thomson, the French electronics manufacturer, to develop the product. The 90 million Euro grant was one of many given to big French companies for high-tech products.
“It is essential,” said French president Jacques Chirac in announcing the grants, “for us to rediscover a taste for risk and pride in innovation.” But he has certainly chosen an odd way to achieve that–government grants to large corporations. Meanwhile, some observers noted, France’s (less politically powerful) start-ups remain starved of capital.
It’s a good sign that France’s leaders are asking why Europe has yet to produce an infotech success story like Google,” the article quotes French IT consultant Alexis Mons saying. But, he says, the top-down approach is the wrong one. As he puts it: “There is no innovation iin innovation management in Europe.”
The bottom line, according to Bernard Buisson, coauthor of a recent book on innovation: “Instead of enabling the creation of new companies, the [French] state is going to waste several billion euros in large projects that won’t deliver.”
The French government wasting money on large projects that won’t deliver? Stop the presses. We have news here.
Somehow, I suspect Google isn’t worried.
(Oh, by the way, the title of this post was translated into French by, of course, Google’s translator tool.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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