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Press release
CNRS launches the Entrepreneurs Club! | |||
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Paris, November 22, 2002 |
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| Geneviève Berger, Director-General of CNRS, is launching the first CNRS Entrepreneurs Club. “At a time when CNRS is proud to be able to say that it has contributed to the emergence of more than 100 innovative businesses over the last three years, we want to improve our practices as regards assistance with business creation and management of relations with industrial partners,” explains Geneviève Berger. The Club will thus embrace this role, instilling an entrepreneurial culture into the laboratories. The CNRS “club des entrepreneurs” is a flexible structure, based on the principle of straight membership with no strings attached. It is open to managers of businesses created over the last four years and using the results of CNRS research, and to people with business creation projects that are based on CNRS know-how or technologies. Any young innovative business that wants to collaborate with CNRS may also become a member on request. There are three aspects to the ambition of the Club: to facilitate access to our recent discoveries, our teams, and our experts; to broaden the contractual relations of its members with the CNRS (combined tutorship of theses, participation in European research programs, or research collaboration); and to pool experience, networks, and skills for the mutual benefit of members. The members of the Club will take part directly in promoting business creation in the laboratories, they will be involved in detecting new technology transfer projects, and they will support the “future” entrepreneurs in their business creation projects. The CNRS investors club will be set up early in 2003 so as to reinforce this mutual benefit approach. Quarterly discussion meetings will be organized around two general cycles: the first one entitled “research and innovation focus” will zoom in on innovation at CNRS, and the second one entitled “discovering the research environment” will take stock of the exchanges as regards support for research development in the context of the European Union. For this launch, CNRS invited ANVAR, the French Agency for Innovation, CNRS’s partner in FIST, CNRS’s subsidiary for extracting added value from research and development. Geneviève Berger was also pleased to see that the European Union’s 6th RTD-FP (Framework Program for Research and Technological Development) for the period from 2002-2006 is to devote 2 billion euros to innovative small businesses. “I think that here we are going to have food for discussion to envisage a more serene future for innovative firms, even if it will not be without its difficulties” concluded Geneviève Berger. Business development
contact: Press contact
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