When Technopolises Have Lost Their Resilience The Grenoble Paradox

With 670,000 residents and 300,000 jobs, Grenoble is considered a medium sized metropolis by European standards. Enclosed by surrounding mountains and thus poorly connected to the rest of the country, theoretically the city had little attributes to warrant such a unique destiny. Beginning as a small town of 22,000 inhabitants at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Grenoble has experienced outstanding demographic and economic growth over the last two centuries. Up until the start of the twentieth century, this was due to industrialization, and then later to flourishing relationships between science and industry. The city is home to a range of hubs structured around business clusters and specialized research labs (i.e., software, computer chip manufacturing, nanotechnologies, health). The most well-known of these clusters is dedicated to nanotechnologies, and in 2005 it was recognized by the French government as a “global competitiveness cluster”. The technopolitan concept crystallized in the territory. And this mindset revealed the dynamic of high value-added businesses and the synergy between scientific industries, and also between these industries and certain segments of society (i.e., administration, businesses, industries, etc.).