[tarekmoz]

I am not sure why you're saying that the Sophia Antipolis tech area is an attempt to build a "Silicon Valley" - It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there.

It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs.

It was not built to mimic SV. And no one claims that except maybe some rare schools/companies brochures that want to sell the place to students/young engineers.

> The current party detaining majority is the Socialist Party (PS) so the idea that innovation comes from the state and individual action is just a burden

That's completely inaccurate... There's a huge effort right now to boost innovation in France by the current government - by Fleur Pellerin, through grants for private companies in tech and many other things.

Look at all those individuals the french government promotes at the CES ... http://blogs.afii.fr/en/2014/01/france-makes-waves-at-ces-20... - it does not look like a burden to the government :)

[vidarh]

> It's mostly big companies there and there's no incentive to build your startup there.

SV started around the large military research facilities, and the semiconductor companies. Some startups (e.g. HP) came fairly early, but the large startup boom in the area happened after there was an established large concentration of technology people working for large stablished companies.

[ahomescu1]

> It's quite huge - around 1500 companies with a lot of R&D labs.

Actually, that might be what's needed. Historically, many of the Silicon Valley successes have been started by engineers leaving an established company to work on their own ideas (example: Intel), not necessarily by young people starting from scratch.