"Fostering Cooperation: The Role of Esprit in Shaping Industrial Behavior"

[From the Introduction]. The 1980s have brought a striking change in the design of European industrial research policies. In the "technology gap" 1960s the policy response to the American challenge was to emulate the apparent reasons of American success: large firms which could take advantage of multinational markets and economies of scale in research and manufacturing. Parochial distributional conflict and market concentration in government owned and trade-protected national flagship companies -- the national champions, like Siemens in Germany, and Thornson in France -- defined the European commercial high technology sector. The intra-European cooperative policies which did emerge, like Euratom, Airbus, and the two European space organizations were also based on obvious needs for sufficient economies of scale. Even then, the cooperation proceeded by fits and starts