We still live today in France with this idea, less and less justified and more and more arrogant, that our capacity for innovation, due to the excellence of our teachers, our researchers and our engineers, and of the quality of our infrastructures, would be much higher than that of the countries of the South and the East. Remember how smugly, at the time of the first oil crisis, we said, “We don't have oil, but we have ideas.” We have to face the facts: we still do not have oil, but we are no longer alone with the ideas and the capacities to exploit them in the form of concrete applications for the benefit of economic and social development. This is the novelty. This is a radical and irreversible change to which we will have to adapt. "(Marc Fontecave)Globalization raises a whole series of organizational, economic, political, cultural and ethical questions for the future of fundamental research. These are the questions that the College de France 2010 back-to-school colloquium, La mondialisation de la recherche. Competition, cooperation, restructuring (October 14 & 15, 2010), had the ambition to face. |