The People Factor ” How Sophia Antipolis Ensures a Supply of Highly Skilled Employees The importance of quality of life in attracting highly skilled workers to a region can be demonstrated through an example put forward by Philippe Servetti, marketing director of C te d'Azur D veloppement (CAD), the semi-public body responsible for promoting the area to international companies. Mr. Servetti proudly tells the story of a company that created two R&D centers simultaneously in Sophia Antipolis and in Munich. Recruitment campaigns for both locations were instantaneously run in national and international newspapers. While Sophia Antipolis received 900 applications, Munich only received 30. It is thus no surprise that the slogans "high-tech, high-life," "where business and people flourish," "C te d'Azur, creativity in action," and "Sophia Antipolis, intelligent by nature" have been used for the promotion of the C te d'Azur by the CAD. Nonetheless, whereas retaining highly skilled personnel once they have come to the region has not been a challenge, attracting them to come has become a pressing issue. According to Christian Poujardieu, director of IBM in La Gaude, close to Sophia Antipolis, companies seeking to employ engineers were short of 1,000 to 1,400 graduates last year. The educational institutions of Sophia, which hold 5,000 students [9] at any given time, have been unable to satisfy the demand for qualified graduates. In order to address this shortage, the Telecom Valley association has gathered numerous Sophia Antipolis players to unite and jointly collaborate with local educational establishments as well as the local government. Jacques Gros, president of the Telecom Valley association from 1999 to 2001 and director of IBM's e-business Solutions Center in La Gaude, believes in the need for networking and co-opetition between Sophia-based businesses in order to address the skill shortage in the area as a critical success factor for the future. Jacques Gros Telecom Valley ” Co-opetition and networking, e-recruitment, and m-tourism Telecom Valley is a nonprofit , business-driven association, which was set up in 1991 by Alcatel Space, Compaq, France Telecom, IBM, Texas Instruments, and ETSI, in order to confront the issue of skills shortage in the Sophia Antipolis region. Born out of a shared need for competencies and skills, this association unites competitors in an example of co-opetition and networking that transcends the conventional competitive borders between businesses. Today, the association consists of approximately 70 members , including high-tech companies, educational and research establishments, and the local chamber of commerce. The association identifies critical issues for the region's success and proposes solutions, which it then presents to local government or realizes through its own projects. One of the first actions of Telecom Valley has been to work together with the local universities and government to create a diploma in telecommunications. Another major project was the conceptualization of the STIC campus that is described above. Other initiatives include an annual competition on innovation in order to promote technological developments in the region, as well as the attempt to attract microelectronics schools to Sophia Antipolis. Furthermore, the association's Education and Recruitment Commission was the first in Europe to set up an e-recruitment service with Web cams on the Internet. Hiring member companies placed their job offers on the Internet, while students from selected engineering and commerce schools throughout the whole of France placed their CVs on the pages of the site. Matches were made and interviews conducted through Web cams. This initiative increased the number of hits on the Telecom Valley Web site per month [10] from 4,000 in October of 2000 to 14,000 in May of 2001. Linking telecom to tourism Aiming to develop major economic perspectives for the region, Telecom Valley has recently launched a project called "m-tourism," which stands for mobile tourism. The project intends to convince local government of the potential that new technologies hold even for the established tourism industry within the region. It is believed that this perspective will improve the standing that Sophia's high-tech companies have with local authorities, which are often critical of high-tech's real benefit to the region. The e-tourism project will build a bridge between the Telecom Valley mobile e-business and mobile technology centers and the region's traditional and politically powerful tourism industry. The aim is to enable hotels and other tourist-driven businesses to personalize their product offering and to add value to their services by offering specifically targeted information, distributed via mobile technology. Telecom Valley now organizes a yearly conference on m-tourism in Nice; at its first conference in 2001, 525 people attended, and that number is expected to double for several years to come. Hence, not only does Telecom Valley raise the awareness of the region throughout the world, it also helps to bridge the huge canyon between the local politicians and high tech. The slow process of establishing a constructive dialog between industry, regional politicians , mayors, universities, the chambers of commerce, etc. in the region and actually creating change, presents a considerable contradiction to the incredibly fast-moving world of high tech. The key to success in such an arduous process is to take things one step at a time, and to make sure that one project that is undertaken is successfully brought to a close and implemented before proceeding to the next one. A lot of trust and understanding needs to be built in the process. Achieving only one success story will broaden people's minds and prove the benefits of the high-tech industry within the region. A major restriction to the association is the fact that all projects are undertaken by employees on a voluntary basis, in addition to their regular jobs. Meetings take place on the evenings or weekends, outside of normal working hours. Although this leads to very effective work, I consider that the appointment of some dedicated, full-time , paid project managers might increase the scope and effectiveness of the association. So far, however, a first attempt to set the association up as a profit-making company was abandoned , since its actions would have created competition between the association and some of its members. | Sophia Antipolis demonstrates the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach as a key ingredient of cross-fertilization and entrepreneurship. Creating an entrepreneurship environment from scratch requires many years of development and careful planning. In the case of Sophia Antipolis, large companies came first, and worked mainly in isolation. Later on, they were joined by national research institutions and then by educational faculties . Not until 30 years after its foundation did the park begin to develop the modern networking structures that have become the norm in high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley in the U.S. We next discuss how French national interests once claimed a monopoly on entrepreneurship, and describe a perspective on possible future state monopolies in the information economy. |
