L’orientation locale des politiques scientifiques : entre coopérations et enfermement

<italic>Scientific local policies strive to reproduce the success that some territories have enjoyed for nearly 40 years, which thanks to close cooperations between science and industry, managed to develop innovations which then became dominant on a worldwide scale. The purpose of this article is to discuss about the interest and the limits of this kind of policy. After having presented the arguments evoked by the literature to justify interest local R & D cooperations, we point out the problems linked to a possible spatial lock-in that might be generated by this policy with regards to emerging and unstable technological areas. We illustrate our matter by analyzing the case of a research aiming at the development of starch-based biopolymers in Champagne-Ardenne.</italic>