Virtually every aircraft built in France - from Airbus A380s and ATR turboprops to Dassault Rafale fighters and Falcon business jets - comes to life in Aerospace Valley, a somewhat large "valley" comprising the south-western regions of Aquitaine and Midi-Pyrenees that contains Europe's largest concentration of aerospace activity.
Centred on the cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse, Aerospace Valley is one of some 70 "clusters of competitiveness" set up by the French government in the middle of the last decade. Their objective has been to encourage regional co-operation and best-practice sharing in key industrial sectors and be a conduit for central research and development funding. Aerospace Valley is one of three in aerospace and seven classed as "world class" clusters.
"We are a vehicle to promote innovation," says Aerospace Valley president Jean-Marc Thomas, senior vice president of research and innovation with Airbus in Toulouse. "We work together to create new ideas. Research projects are submitted to an Aerospace Valley council which proposes which ones should be put forward for public funding."
With more than 550 members employing 120,000 people, most of them around Bordeaux and Toulouse, the organisation can lay claim to be the biggest aerospace cluster in Europe, says Thomas. As well as industry giants Airbus, Dassault, Safran and Thales, Aerospace Valley represents almost 300 small and medium-sized enterprises in aeronautics, space and "embedded systems": avionics and other aircraft technologies.
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It's not just about the big players |
Since its establishment in 2005, Aerospace Valley has endorsed 400 research proposals from its members, of which more than 220 have been approved by government agencies for funding worth a total of €640 million ($922 million). Some of these projects have been completed and others are in progress, says Thomas.
One of the organisation's objectives is to make the supply chain more robust and less dependent on contracts handed down from the big players. French SMEs tend to be smaller and therefore more vulnerable than their German counterparts, says Thomas. These family-owned businesses need to merge or at least work together to gain critical mass and become more competitive.
"It is all about de-localisation, encouraging them to climb the value chain," says Thomas. "We are convinced that innovation is the way to keep them ahead of the competition and give them more chance to retain jobs here in France. We cannot resist the aspirations of emerging countries so we must be strongly proactive."
It is a strategy that Thomas claims is working. One-third of the 220 Aerospace Valley research and technology projects chosen for central government funding are being led by SMEs.
Source: Flight International
