The French Government’s ‘Grenelle’ Housing Plan: NATF Working party on “Innovation and research”. Incentives to innovation in the Housing and Building Sector. Interim Report - Jan. 2011

Jan. 13, 2011

Moderators for the Working Party:
Ms Inès REINMANN – Acxior Corporate Finance
Prof. Yves FARGE – National Acadcemy of Technologies of France (NATF)

OVERVIEW

Two main messages transpire from the WPs analysis into status and development of innovation in the Housing and Building Sector.

1. France should modernise its vision about innovation processes:

The French Housing and Building Sector has a very restrictive view about innovation, its fields and areas of application.

The professionals in the sector when faced with innovation needs tend to only consider the technological aspects. The scope of the areas where innovation is possible is vast and their combinations point to a potential that hitherto has not been fully exploited by the actors. It is therefore useful to update the ‘popular’ or ‘main street’ definition and have it move closer to the OECD definition that includes scientific, technological organisation, financial and market activities. (cf. Introduction).

Moreover, each of the various geographic scales involved offers room for innovation. At the local level, the fact that one federates the initiatives (and also the actors) allows us to see innovation in terms of demand and in terms of the dialogue between actors; At the national level, it is the sheer power of in terms of research, creativity and market readying of products as conducted by the major industrial groups or the State’s research establishments that enables emergence of innovative products and processes. Au the European and global levels, drafting joint programmes and importing foreign innovation processes also represents a strong potential for evolution of the sector.

2. France should move from an obligation to invest means to an obligation to produce results plus the requirement that the results satisfy overall performance criteria:

The objective here is to enlarge the performance perimeter in terms of the actors and their concerns.

As far as the actors go, innovation rarely replies to a need expressed by the end-users in the housing and building sector and more frequently comes from the component or system suppliers. Contrary to other sectors, innovation is not necessarily the relevant response to market demands. A part-vision of the housing and building sector leads to and enhances this behaviour: the building is seen as a purely technical object and not at all seen as a point of service to end-users. In this narrow view, there is often a technical answer to a technical problem. Technologies should exist to serve the end-user. The aim then becomes providing a global answer to the improvement requirements for a given service thereby enabling use performance parameters.

Where the actors’ concerns are involved, it now becomes appropriate to enlarge the notion of performance parameters to encompass all the aspects that constitute today a set of major issues: energy procurement, energy savings, environment and health.

The changes in the housing and building sector require that these two changes be introduced to our appreciation of the innovation paradigm. Indeed, the challenge now and over the new few years, for the housing and building sector, will only be met by more and better innovation.

 Cf. full report (in French)

In times past the tenet of the Apocalypse underscored the operational folly of engaging in any application of the precautionary principle.

Since then, the so-called "precaution" has seen numerous, ample and occasionally joyous demonstrations. Perhaps the best among these is the episode of the H1N1 Swine flu epidemic.

 If the epidemic turned out to be less catastrophic than imagined, it was due less to measures taken by he Government, purchasing 10% of the world's stock of vaccines and one third of the world's capacity to produce Tamiflu, than to the low level of virulence of the virus, even though it is contagious. 

If the French population protects itself, the French themselves are scared. They believe that cancer is spreading, that modern life-style is very damaging, that the threat tomorrow will lie in the world of nanotechnologies. "Nature" is the ultimate rampart, while they protect themselves from this and indeed have never lived so well or so long.

Moreover, this precautionary 'unreason' distracts us and turns our attention away from the real environmental problems, such as destruction of the biodiversity or the need to gradually move away from fossil energy sources. As the humorist, Pierre Dac, once said "we can no longer afford to be afraid". Even little flames can burn you.

The sole aim of the book is to avoid getting burned collectively: strictly useless investments, inoperable regulations, and applications of precaution that serve no purpose whatsoever. The precautionary principle simply cannot ne "reasonable"; it is and remains an insult to our intelligence. 
 

Bionotes on the author

Jean de Kervasdoué is Professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers(CNAM), director of the Ecole Pasteur/Cnam (public health issues), Fellow of the NATF; he is by training an economist specialist of health questions and also an agronomist. he ha also authored numerous books among which, in French "Les Prêcheurs de l’apocalypse". 'The tenets of the Apocalypse', (Ed. Plon, 2007) and hundreds of papers published in the areas of health and the environment.