Keywords: Internationalised public services, Concessions abroad, Suez Canal, globalised business models, colonial equipment F15, F23, L94, L92, L95, L97

Whilst being enrooted in public "common goods", French utilities, either State-controlled or private, became more and more committed to strategies of developing abroad their portfolio of engineering and managing skills. They followed the past of economic imperialism along geopolitics in emerging countries (Russia, Ottoman Empire, Latin America), then also throughout the colonial empire; such offensives were embodied by the adventure of the Suez Canal. From the 1980s, the reconstruction of the worldwide connections opened doors to geoeconomics, that is the will to resist competition and to conquer market shares abroad thanks to the valuation of capital of competence and trust. Every public, privatised or already quoted companies took part to the run for concessions and the deliveries of engineering and managing services (waste, water, postal, railway, bus, energy utilities). This contributed to the competitiveness of French economy and economic patriotism.

F Fr re en nc ch h u ut ti il li it ti ie es s c co om mm mi it tt te ed d t to o g gl lo ob ba al li iz za at ti io on n ( (1 19 9t th h--2 21 1s st t c ce en nt tu ur ri ie es s) )

Hubert Bonin, professor & researcher For decades, French economic utilities-social and health utilities being set apart from this study-were oriented towards infrastructures and services earmarked to the development of a strong national economy (transportation, energy), and to local communities' life and economic clusters thanks to grids for water and transport services. A vision of proximity predominated; but the imperial and colonial expansion opened doors to some paths of globalization overseas, till the turn of the 1960s. Nonetheless, the run for competitiveness to reinforce the infrastructures of French economy or leftist minds pleading the reinforcement of the State economic apparatus (appareil économique d'État, with the Administration and an array of State-owned corporations) paved the way to a refocus on national and local modus operandi-even if the overseas territories (Antilles, Nouvelle-Calédonie, La Réunion, etc.) were involved. Later, the fresh neoliberal trends, first on a European dimension, second along a world-wide openness, questioned such ideologic and business models, which led to globalised mindsets and practices from the 1990s.

National and local roots

First dedicated to local or national developments, management, and use, French utilities assumed a philosophy of proximity which involved local railway transportation, networks of small canals, waste, water, and energy management, etc.

Utilities have even carried out the mission to supply society and economy with shared services, along the philosophy of "common goods", what is qualified in France by "public good" (bien public) and "public services" (services publics). Relying on basic infrastructures (energy grids, canals, pipes, railways, ports, airports, etc.) to be financed by the State, local institutions, or by market issues by quoted companies, along the diversified statutes inherited from the history of politics. Either the investments and management of utilities have been decentralized and externalised for the sake of some liberal minds, or they have been taken in charge by local or national authorities because their profitability was not promising or because political majorities asserted that a public control over utilities was necessary to avoid too much profit earned on common goods.

Railways had been privately set up, but were nationalised in 1938 and merged into SNCF, and the same for gas and electricity in 1946, with Gaz de France and Électricité de France, and for postal then also for telephonic networks (1889) under the cover of PTT (Poste, télégraphe, telephone, 1879). Numerous local institutions (municipalities or communities) demanded a public management of water, waste, and local public transportation, whilst other ones betted on externalisation through concessions to private companies, for instance about water management (Compagnie générale des eaux, 1853; Société lyonnaise des eaux & de l'éclairage, 1880).

Some paths of internationalised were anyway followed: networks of telegraph crossed over frontiers; the transportation of postal items relied on maritime connectionswith the famous Malle Postale for the State exchanges overseas, managed by private companies; connections were managed between European railway companies. The first submarine cable connecting France and the United States was laid in 1869 by the Société du câble transatlantique français and connected Brest to Cape Cod near Boston via Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. But those services were quantitatively limited.

Globalization through imperialism (from the 1850s to 1914)

France challenged its competitors (mainly UK, Belgium, Germany) for international economic expansion. An example might be Société lyonnaise des eaux & de l'éclairage that was founded for "the acquisition, purchase, leasing and operation, in France and abroad, of any concession and undertaking relating to water and lighting". The progressive accumulation of engineering and management portfolios of skills in France itself could be valued through foreign investments and contracts, even more because the Paris banking marketplace could seize on opportunities to finance foreign investments by French firms when they set up sister companies, for instance in Russia, the Ottoman Empire or even China.

French utilities companies were granted concessions to build and managed railways networks or commercial harbours. They were French-rooted because of the Paris location of headquarters, board and general assembly, and the flows of francs to foster the capital and bonds issues, thanks to investment banks, colonial banks and, for subscriptions, retail commercial banks, with in reverse dividends to be paid to French shareholders-with sometimes Belgian, British, Dutch or even German interests as co-stakeholders. Lead-managers and engineers were mainly French, even if more and more managers, technicians, and workforce were from local origin. And often French public works entities assumed the building itself, and whilst industrialists could supply equipments. and harbours: Puerto Belgrano, in Argentina, in 1911;in Brazil: Pernambuco in 1906-1909, Para in 1906-1916, whilst Paris bank Société générale oversaw the Callao Port in Peru from 1887, financed it and managed its development in direct, with French engineers. A key example of this internationalisation move was the Pekin-Hankeou (Beijing-Wuhan) railway, financed and built by a French coalition from 1898 (1,136 km), till its sinisation in 1908.

Globalization through colonialism

The second colonisation move paved the way to Franco-French initiatives as the empire was mainly a preserve for French interests. Despite the independence of colonies at the turn of the 1960s, the influence of French utilities could be exerted through contracts for advices in engineering and management, as for new lines in Mauritania (1963) and Gabon (1974-83).

Globalization symbolised by the Suez Canal (1857-1956)

When converged imperial and commercial expansionism abroad, Saint-Simonian spirit of positivist development of entrepreneurship, and techniques provided by the first industrial revolution, the idea of connecting Mediterranean and Red Sea was seized on by diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. He succeeded in convincing the Egyptian and Ottoman Authorities to grant to a French group the concession of a canal through the Suez Isthmus in 1854, till 1968. He relied on the Paris marketplace to supply the funds to the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez created in 1858, on the technical engineering piled up to establish a dense network of canals in France itself, industrial knowledge to produce dredgers and tugboats, and portfolios of skills in the management of shipping flows in harbours to establish the canal, the Port-Saïd harbour and maintenance workshops.

From its opening in November 1869, the Suez waterway became a key axis to shipping globalization-which explains that the UK purchased in 1875 the 44 percent of the capital of the Compagnie that had been attributed to Egypt, because that latter struggled against financial crisis: in the 1880s ten of the 32 members of its board of directors were Englishmen, among whom shipowners. A duo supervision of the canal took shape, with the French Company to manage the waterway, and the British Empire to control Egypt from the 1880s.

Anyway, French engineers and managers led the Compagnie till the 1950s, from Paris, Port-Said, and Ismailia; but it relied also on Greek pilots and various submanagers or workers coming from the whole East and Central Mediterranean. By its Europeanised capital, its workforce, its basket of ever renewed techniques for managing the transit or deepening the canal, the Compagnie embodied "growth in open economy", even if a huge majority of the shipping companies crossing the Isthmus were British, then also, in the 20th century, from Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Italia, joined by Japan and the US in the interwar period.

The efficiency of the canal was supported by the technical units in ports which provided ship maintenance and maintenance services, for small and medium-sized vessels and for the canal fleet (tugs, floating cranes, dredges, etc.), thanks to major equipment (presses, foundry, large fleet of machine tools, forge, underwater work, engine repair).

In 1930, a fifth of the tonnage passing through Suez was transported by diesel driven vessels; the growing world economy and the development of overseas empires benefitted greatly from this technological advance. Transits through Suez went up exponentially: between 1895 and 1900, some 3,400 to 3,500 vessels passed through annually; then 6,000 in 1928-1929. The yearly tonnage of transit reached records of 20,3 million in 1912, 33,5m in 1929 and 36,5m in 1937. While the Indian peninsula dominated the trade links, the Far East also played a part, as did Oceania and East Africa. Understandably, due to its crude oil, the Middle East too figured prominently in the 1930s (from 2% of transits in 1913 to 24.8% in 1938). South to North trade dominated the flow and accounted for two thirds of transits in 1910-1930 as well as in 1935-1937. Cotton, cereals (Indian and Australian wheat, rice), cane sugar, groundnuts, copra, soya, oilseeds, etc. were sent to Europe as were rubber, jute and Indian hemp and manganese. Later, Indonesian, and Middle Eastern crude too joined the list. In the 1950s, the canal benefited from the oil revolution and the flows of Asian minerals to welcome more and more South-North traffic. The Compagnie succeeded in balancing funds earmarked to the successive programs of modernisation (eight from 1870 to [1955][1956][1957][1958][1959][1960] and delivering important dividends, because it reaped huge revenues-till the nationalisation of the canal in July 1956 by the antiimperialist Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Beyond financial aspects, the impact of such an internationalised utility for French economy could be summed up by strong progress in the management of waterways and harbours in France itself, its empire or even in some Chinese French concessions. The skills of public works firms were sharpened among their technical and engineering teams, with a chain effect all along the sector, till their subcontractors. A globalised capital of experience could thus be developed abroad-even if the Lesseps' Panama canal was a financial failure (1878-1889).

The contestability of French utilities, from liberalization to globalization

The key question aroused from the 1980s: what happened to the spirit of public service, the values of the general interest or common goods, the control of public power, at the heart of the process of transformation of the economy of public services (utilities)? A European framework of the regulation of entities was conceived; they became SGEIs, or "services of general economic interest", within the ideological framework of liberalisation and deregulation, even if the legislation continues to strongly regulate SGEIs.

Without mobilising here economic public law or meditations on the new macroeconomic balance of collective services, we must determine how the entities managing SGEIs have been increasingly subjected to financial, economic, and social issues: they were challenged in their identity and national roots, hence the use of the concept of "contestability". Every guaranteed position or local and national monopoles fell down because of the liberation of calls for tenders and concessions, under the influence of the US then of the UK, that led the European Union to open doors to transnational competition for utilities (air, railway, port management, water management, waste management, and energy).

Governments had to submit decisive laws in 1984 and 1998 for transportation, and in 1992 and 2010 for general utilities. An international agreement, the Trade in Services Agreement, was even designed in the 2010s between the European Union and 22 countries (with the US) to liberalise the economy of services; even if it had not been concluded, it epitomized the philosophy of intensifying competition, in public services. The hunt for situation rents became little by little a rule through the questioning of the duration of public service delegations and the imposition of rigorous standards of transparency in the negotiation processes upstream and in the management downstream-which couldn't but entail profitability. These liberalisation and competition policies led to a complete paradigm shift: it aligned the management of collective services linked to the general interest with the management of collective services integrated into the market economy, hence the term "marketization" or "commoditization" used in this regard, even more when some utilities firms were quoted on the Stock Exchange (Euronext) and were thus submitted to "financialization" philosophy.

Such strategic turning points opened doors to foreign offensives, mainly in energy, then in public transportation. This revolution shook business models and enterprise culture: could French utilities resist to such challenges? Internationalisation and globalization were strategic paths to be followed to "reinvent business models".

The building of big utilities groups

Paradoxically, the name of Suez has been reawakened on the field of utilities at the end of the 20th century. In parallel, each surviving group revolutionised its business model, and French economy was equipped with an array of utilities champions: EDF and Engie, in energy, Suez, Veolia-the inheritor of Compagnie générale des eaux-, Paprec, SAUR, in local services of proximity, SNCF, for railways and freight road transportation (Geodis), and its subsidiary Keolis for local transportation services, competing with a subsidiary of the public financial group Caisse des dépôts, Transdev, and La Poste (for postal services), not to speak of local public entities. The reshuffling was pursued in 2021-2022 when Engie sold its stake in Suez to its rival Veolia. Because the regulator intended to preserve some basic competition, Suez survived with its assets in France and few ones abroad, but it had lost its main aspects of a globalised group.

The threat of a competitive market for utilities, first mainly on a European field, exerted its crucial influence. Those French firms were submitted to harsh competition, in France, mainly on the European level, and then worldwide. They were therefore able to achieve their strategies of European and globalised developments as "multi-utilities" groups.

Globalized strategies: water utilities at the turn of the 21st century

This strategic revolution was embodied by the expansion of French water utilities all over the world at the turn of the 21st century. It could rely on Degrémont, a subsidiary that provides water treatment technologies and engineering for the construction of its sanitation equipment. All in all, French water capitalism conquered some geopolitical and societal legitimacy, beyond its grip on revenues and profits, and the valuation of the common pot of its technologies and engineering.

Following strategies of Europeanisation and globalisation in the 21st century

Energy became a key field for the internationalisation of utilities. The young GDF-Suez/Engie defined a strategy of external growth: in 2010, it purchased in the UK International Power, rich with plants in the US and Australia, and united its assets with its subsidiaries abroad into New International Power. It became then the first world energetic utility. Throughout the 2010s it acquired all over the world societies specialised in "energetic optimisation", and Transportadora Associada de Gâs in 2019, managing half of gaz pipes in Brazil. Engie's workforce reached 171,000 in 2019, including 137,000 in Europe, but 6,300 in North America, 14,300 in Latin America, 6,700 in Asia and Oceania, 3,500 in Africa and 3,100 in the Middle East. Europe (with €47.3 billion) accounted for a large part of the €60.1 billion turnover, ahead of Latin America (5.3m), North America (4.5m), Asia and Oceania (1.7m), the Middle East (1m) and Africa (0.2m).

Such a rapid and intense growth led anyway to some oversized and overindebted conglomerate at the turn of the 2020s, which explains the sale of its stake in Suez and of a large part of its activities downstream-management of energy in buildings, etc.to Vinci, a public work company, in 2022. It refocused therefore on its key assets in utilities, as a champion able to compete with Spanish Iberdrola, German RWE, Swedish Vattenfall or Italian ENEL, to contest the growing influence of Chinese firms in Asia and Africa, and to develop its core skills in gas transportation and thermal plants. Whilst getting rid of its big coal-thermal plants (in Australia or elsewhere), it invested in "renewable energy" developments. It is a strong hydroelectric producer in Brazil, the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom; and it manages wind farms in Canada, Portugal, Australia, Latin America, Morocco, or South Africa.

On its side, the State-controlled EDF had to struggle against its own managerial issues: it depends on the oscillating policies of the successive governments about fuelling its capital, the openness to European competitors, the brakes put on the restart of a programme of investments in the atom sector, which deprived it of its strong historical skills in engineering and led to missing foreign orders, despite a few in China. It succeeded anyway to launch a technological programme dedicated to giant atom plants, the EPR (European pressurized reactor, then Evolutionary power reactor). In parallel with one plant in France, it reached contracts in Finland and in the UK (two at Hinkley Point, two at Sizewell). But the costs jumped considerably because of big technical deficiencies, and these projects are leading to intense financial setbacks. The alliance with Chinese CGN is swaying more and more: CGN overpassed EDF on the technological field and reaped contracts in China or else; and their couple for a plant in England suffers from the Western demonization of CGN alongside the anti-Chinese geoeconomic offensive.

Beyond this atom industry, EDF designed an international overall strategy in 1990 and chose a few countries as targets to build solid sub-groups. The UK prevailed with three companies: Water and waste management evolved considerably to confront the financial and technological requirements of globalisation. A harsh capitalist battle occurred in 2021 when Veolia launched a bid offer on its rival Suez, which had got its independence from Engie and succeeded in concluding huge contracts abroad in the 2010s: water desalination plants in Mexico or Australia, management of water infrastructures in India, in New Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Madras or Bombay, with 44m Indians connecter in 2016. The intent was to build another French champion in public services able to reach the size required by globalization, that it the ability to prospect markets all over the areas which invest massively into water and waste management because of the size of urbanisation and high-level consumption, in the Middle East and Asia for instance. The merger was achieved in 2022, even if the regulation rules to avoid a monopolistic size imposed to preserve Suez in France. But Veolia as a giant company (with 230,000 employees, of which 50,000 coming from Suez) will assume the transnationalisation of its capital of competences all over the world.

It proclaims decidedly its strategy of globalization, first in the Middle East: one hundred million inhabitants there need more and more equipments in public services, with sea-water desalination plants, water and waste management, climatization systems in commercial malls or buildings; and more and more recycling polluted waste for the account of oil and gas plants, and the same in China to tackle contaminated waste, in association with oil group Sinopec (2016). The remnants of Suez itself offer a serious foreign implantation, with positions in China, India (since 1978), Australia, the Middle East and Africa (Morocco, Senegal, South Africa), which produces 25 percent of its turnover in 2021, with an objective of 40 percent a few years ahead, to rebuild an international scope.

Postal services jumped from the sole French market to a European size when La Poste got conscious of the necessity to become competitive for the transportation and distribution of parcels. Within the new digital commercial ecosystem, orders exploded when firms delivered in direct their consuming goods, either being specialised (like Amazon, Rakuten, CDiscount, etc.), or joining the trend in parallel with their networks of shops. La Poste had to sharpen its skills on that field to evolve from a niche (Chronopost from 1985) to a large activity (Colissimo) and commonplace mass deliveries (BtoB, BtoC); it had to be competitive to seduce the commercial firms and get their trust. This explains the creation of Geopost in 1999, which purchased companies managing the DPD franchise all over Western Europe, first in Germany in 2001 (Deutscher Paketdienst, then from 2008 Dynamic Parcel Distribution), or elsewhere, before uniting its brands under the DPDgroup trademark in 2015.

In parallel, the group took over companies in parcel transportation and delivery in Europe (Seur in Spain in 2004, Siodemka in Polond in 2014, wnDirect in the UK in 2014, BRT in Italia, etc.) and abroad (partnership Turkey in 2003, purchases in South Africa, India, Brazil, South-Eastern Asia, Egypt, Dubaï, etc.). In 2021 DPDgroup is active in 24 European countries. In the 2020s, this branch gets 85 percent of its turnover from international subsidiaries, with 41,000 of its 48,000 employees active abroad. Whilst La Poste is steadily increasing its banking and finance retail activities through its French network and under the umbrella of public group Caisse des dépôts, it revolutionised its business model and culture thanks to the development of this express transportation and delivery which embodies the third industrial revolution through its aspects of massive, rapid, and transnational services.

Transportation as public services was also seized on by internationalisation. Public (SNCF, Keolis, a subsidiary of SNCF with a share of 30 per cent by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Transdev, RATP) and private (for local bus management) were submitted to the threat of European rivals reaping concessions and markets shares in France.

They decided to answer it by launching offensives in Europe and then abroad, to counterattack-for instance in front of Deutsche Bahn, Renfe or Trenitalia-and preserve their turnover, but also and mainly to sharpen their skills and to benefit from their technical and managerial competitive advantage. It was a revolution of their business culture as they had relied for decades on employees with privileged social statutes and on a monopolistic way of life.

It was therefore a strong jump into the struggle to get new concessions contracts on foreign markets. First, SNCF can rely on its sister companies joining London (Eurostar), Brussels and the Netherlands (Thalys), Italy, and Switzerland, in the wake of a joint venture with CFF set up in 1984 for TGV connections, before the Lyria brand was adopted in 2002. Second, each European railway company fought to get concessions for regional services: in the US, SNCF (through Keolis) won contracts in the Great Boston (the sixth US suburbs network, in 2014), before Virginia (2009) and Massachusetts (2014). It broke through in the UK (London-Docklands, Manchester, then Wales in 2018), Sweden (2003), in India (Hyderabad) or in Australia (Melbourne), before Qatar (with RATP) in 2017. As soon as 2016, SNCF disposed of 50,000 employees out of France versus 210,000 in France, and obtained a third of its turnover abroad, whilst Keolis got 40 percent of its turnover from its foreign concessions in 2017. In 2018, Keolis began operating the Pujiang line, the first automatic line of the Shanghai metro, as well as the Songjiang tram lines in the suburbs of Shanghai, and it also won a six billion euros contract to operate the entire Wales rail network, the Wales & Borders network. Last, SNCF intended to manage its own trains between in a few countries and started in Spain in 2020.

On its side, Transdev had grown in France in public transportation since 1989, with the Transdev brand since 1992; its priority was to develop regional coach connections, which led to a portfolio of skills to be exploited in other countries. succeeded in gaining contracts in the US for fixed-route and shuttle bus systems in several states, in Sweden, and especially in Germany. In 1997, Transdev bought London United, which operated 8 per cent of London's buses, and won tenders from Nothingham (tramway), Porto (metro) and the Melbourne tramway network; it became then the world's leading tram operator. It claimed to be one of the first European public transport operators, especially when, in 2006, it took control of the first Dutch operator, Connexxion, even though it abandoned its activities in Germany, Sweden, Belgium and Finland in the early 2010s.

Only a few large target areas remain: France, the Netherlands, North America (purchase of Voyago in 2019, Ontario Line in Toronto in 2022), Great Britain, Southern Europe, and Asia-Pacific. With Trenitalia, it co-founded Thelio for Franco-Italian in 2011 but retired in 2016 to refocus on regional connections. The perspectives of an alliance with the solid German utilities group Rethmann might be considered after that latter acquired 30 per cent of its capital in 2018 and after they merged their activities of transportation in Germany, which became thus the second foreign market for Transdev behind the US.

Following quite the same track, RATP, which managed the monopole of public transportation in Paris and its suburbs (bus, metropolitan, tramway), reacted to the threat of losing it from 2023 and anticipated such a revolution. It set up the RATP-Dev subsidiary in 2002 to prospect tenders in French regions and more and more in foreign ones. It intended to value its capital of competences in the management of lines on a large range of skills, to bring overall "solutions" beyond mere driving means of transport. All in all, RATP asserted itself as the third worldwide operator of public transports, with a presence in fourteen countries in 2022: in London, Italia (Firenze, Arezzo), South Africa (Johannesburg), India (Mumbai), Egypt (Cairo metropolitan), etc.

In parallel, RATP and SNCF could rely on their common engineering subsidiary SYSTRA-resulting from the merger of each of their subsidiaries in 1992-to conceive transportation infrastructures ahead of their management. From 50 percent of the turnover obtained abroad in 2012, its share jumped to 70 percent in 2019, either thanks to the diffusion of its capital of technical reputation, or to external growth, with specialised companies purchased in eleven countries.

Overall concessions in public services have prospered all over the world, first because State authorities longed to finance huge investments to extend and refurbish basic equipments; second such an externalisation could alleviate the cost of managing public employees; third private firms disposed of more power to negotiate subcontracts and there too to cut into expenses; fourth economic patriotism had to be taken into account in face of the harsh offensives of Chinese firms. * Like the whole economy, the growth of economic public services or utilities was driven by managers and engineers with a spirit of openness to Europe, especially since the shareholders of companies, almost all private until 1938 (railways) or 1946 (energy), outside the PTT and ports, were led by business bankers eager to make the Paris square participate in the international expansion of capitalism. The financial ambitions and entrepreneurial spirit converged to highlight the technologies and the capital of skills of these companies and spread them abroad, in particular to respond to the British or German offensives, then also North American. Such growth prospects in the open economy explain the breakthroughs in Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America, but also the huge project of the Suez Canal.

The construction of a huge colonial empire in Africa and Asia provided an even more exciting opportunity for utilities. In each territory, the Public Authority has combined the private and public sectors for the growth of infrastructures and services essential to boost the economy of "development" of natural resources, urbanization, and the daily life of the populations, whether they were indigenous or European. From the 1890s to independence in the 1950s and 1960s, a field was opened for the deployment of technological engineering and know-how in the management of a public service.

After the relative decline caused by decolonization and the priority given first to the reconstruction and modernization of France, in face of the North American offensive in Europe in particular, the construction of the economic union of Western Europe, the growing integration of transatlantic economies and the multinationalization of enterprises, followed by globalisation, which began in the 1990s, have changed the European and global economic framework. They have been stimulated by global competition for technology markets, particularly in the areas of water and waste management, public transport, energy, postal services, and port management.

France therefore had to fight to not lose ground against European or Asian rivals and to build up counteroffensive technical, managerial, and financial schemes. The dominant thinking in France and especially in Europe in favour of the liberalisation of the public service sectors has stimulated these struggles since companies, public or private, have all engaged in European and global deployment strategies.

Thus, there have been several stages in the life of public service companies, from simple internationalisation and colonization to the revival of internationalisation, and then to transnationalisation within the framework of globalisation. Each time, it was necessary to change the body of mentalities of managers, public or private, adapt the corporate culture, diversify the portfolio of technical and managerial know-how, and finally to welcome foreigners among the leadership teams.

abroad their portfolio of engineering and managing skills. They followed the past of economic imperialism along geopolitics in emerging countries (Russia, Ottoman Empire, Latin America), then also throughout the colonial empire; such offensives were embodied by the adventure of the Suez Canal. From the 1980s, the reconstruction of the worldwide connections opened doors to geoeconomics, that is the will to resist competition and to conquer market shares abroad thanks to the valuation of capital of competence and trust. Every public, privatised or already quoted companies took part to the run for concessions and the deliveries of engineering and managing services (waste, water, postal, railway, bus, energy utilities). This contributed to the competitiveness of French economy and economic patriotism.

KEY WORDS F15, F23, L94, L92, L95, L97,

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  in modern economic history at Sciences Po Bordeaux & at Bordeaux School of Economics research centre-Bordeaux University

  Chemins de fer Constantinople-Salonique, under the guidance of Philippe Vitali, the head of a big public work firm. In the second half of the 19th century, Russia became a key target, beyond mining, industry and banking. French investors and engineers accompanied a company that equipped and manage the navigation on Moskowa and Neva rivers; they set up in 1898

	Compagnie centrale d'électricité de Moscou (with Belgian Compagnie internationale
	d'électricité); they conceived the Nord-Donetz railway through a huge project financing to build a 600 km railway in 1908, and a few other railways (Altaï, Ouest-Oural, Chemins de fer russes).

Internal West-European competition impulsed financiers to godfather railways companies in Spain-as for the Pereire with Ccompañía de los Caminos de Hierros del Norte (Madrid-Irun in 1856) and the Rothschild (Compañía de los ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante, in 1856, which merged in 1898 with Compañía de los ferrocarriles de Tarragona a Barcelona y Francia)-private societies till the creation of public Renfe in 1941.

The Ottoman Empire lured investors and engineers, spurred by Banque impériale ottomane, the representative of French capital, in competition with Deutsche Banksupervising the BBB-Berlin-Byzance-Bagdad-and the German-Swiss Compagnie des chemins de fer orientaux: Chemins de fer Beyrouth-Damas-Hauran (1891) to connect Beyrouth to Damas, followed by Société ottoman du chemin de fer

Damas- Hamah (1901)

,

Smyrne-Kassaba (1901)

, Transatlantic business also drew French utilities in Latin America, despite the hegemony of British and then US interests there. Investment banks supported French engineering to conceive and manage railways, in Argentina, with Compagnie française des chemins de fer de la province de Buenos Aires in 1905, with 1,600 km, or also in 1911; in Chile with Chemin de fer longitudinal

Nord-Sud du Chili in 1910;

  From 1958, after the end of the Egyptian adventure, it has become the brand-mark of a financial group, Compagnie financière de Suez, with its investment bank Indosuez, and then the purchase of the financial holding Société générale de Belgique in 1988, which controlled several energy utilities. Both were broken down and their assets scattered among several groups, and a mere holding survived, Compagnie de Suez, that merged in 1997 with Société lyonnaise des eaux, of which Suez had become the controlling stakeholder in 1967-1974.Lyonnaise des eaux had launched a strategy internationalisation since 1980, mainly in Asia(Macao Waters in 1985) and the UK (Northumbrian Waters in). In 1988, for the first time, the users served in the distribution of drinking water abroad exceeded those of France: 13 million against 10 million. Whatever the innovative nature of each operation, this did not change the centre of gravity of the group: Lyonnaise des Eaux remained a French firm in its power centres, its information networks, and its decision-making procedures; it remained organized around a separation between France and the international. The process of weaving a globalized business model was completed in the 1990s-2000s after a boom of expansion (in 1993: Buenos Aires, Sydney, Mexico, Rostock, Chine; in 1997: Manille, Djakarta, Casablanca): in 1997, it got 40 million customers for water services abroad in face of 13m in France. Grouping water and waste management sectors from the various entities finally merged led to the subsidiary Suez Environnement in 2002.Through several financial stages, the group, renamed Suez in 2001, ended controlling utilities in France and in Belgium (100 percent of Belgian leader Electrabel in2003- 2005). This strategy evolving from finance to utilities led to binational "champion". It was still reinforced in 2006-2008 when it merged with GDF-Gaz de France after the privatisation of that co-leader of French energy with EDF-Électricité de France, which stayed under the State control because of its core atom branches. GDF-Suez was thus born as a giant in utilities: water management, waste management, overall energy, energetic services to companies. Its name changed to Engie in July 2008.Transnationalisation therefore prevailed as a real European group took shape between 1988 and 2008. The legacy of the Suez Canal was a name, but also a refreshed spirit of enterprise, now onwards oriented towards a large panel of utilities, in France and Belgium as historical basis of Engie. It became the third worldwide group in energy (besides oil firms) and supervised a huge subsidiary specialised in non-energetic services, which reused the name Suez on the field of environmental activities (mainly water and waste management).

  Suez got allied to the Catalan group Agbar, then purchased it in 2014, establishing solid footholds on the Spain market. The European central and oriental countries were also prospected. In the US, the first contracts were signed in 1998 with Atlanta, the very first large city to privatise water management, and Milwaukee, leading Suez to control in 2000 US Waters Resources. Australia was penetrated, first in SydneyThe Chinese boom allowed Suez to federate a consistent pole: in addition to Macao, Chongqing, Shanghai and Quindao were among the 15 cities where it started managing water and sanitation services for a total of 12 million inhabitants through Sino-French Water Development, a joint venture with Chinese partners, at the start of the 2000s. In 2002-2003, Veolia obtained water management in the city of Shenzhen (2.2 million inhabitants) near Hong Kong and in the Pudong district (Shanghai), and the management of several water treatment plants. Both also used the association with local communities or societies.Emerging countries have been integrated into this foreign strategy: their giant agglomerations have become targets for a transfer of legal and financial expertise and liquid flow management technology. Such a privatization would provide a solution to the lack of a sound public economic apparatus; the revenues generated by the management of water networks would go to the expenses necessary for their maintenance and extension. The groups have affirmed their desire to become actors of sustainable development, to demonstrate the viability of capitalist intervention in water management in urban agglomerations, even in deprived neighbourhoods.

	South Africa was a main target, with ten million inhabitants served by Suez in 2002 in the Eastern Cape, Limpopo Province, and Johannesburg), accompanied by Morocco (Casablanca in 1997, with 4 million inhabitants), the Philippines (Manila in
	1997) or the Middle East (Amman and Gaza in 1999. Footholds were established in Mexico (7.5 million people served in 2002, including 5 million in half of Mexico City), Chile (Santiago in 1997), Argentina (Buenos Aires in 1993, then the world's largest water concession with 9 million inhabitants) and Brazil. Suez ended gathering 9,000
	employees in Latin America.
	They conceived three parallel strategies: Europe, the USA, and emerging countries. Veolia (Berlin for 1998-2029)

and Suez-Eurawasser got committed in concessions in Germany; Italy (Suez in Pisa in 2003); the UK (Southern Water for Veolia; Northumbrian in 1995-sold in 2003 because of its thin profit margin, Northeast Water, Essex & Suffolk Water, for Suez, with 4,3 million inhabitants for potable water and 1,6 m for potable water et 2,6 for water treatment).

  London Electricity Board, 1998; SWEB Energy in South West England in 1999; Seeboard in South East England in 2002. They merged into EDF Energy in 2002 which acquired in 2008 British Energy, a privatised nuclear power production company, making EDF Energy the largest electricity producer and distributor in the United Kingdom, with 15,000 people and 5.4 million clients in 2018-even if retail distribution activities, equipped with a grid of power lines serving London, the Southeast and East England and providing electricity to 7.9 million, were sold in 2010 to alleviate the debt. The second target was Italy, with first developments from 2005 and the purchase of n°2 Edison in 2012. , in the UK, Italy and Belgium; and all in all, 30 percent of the turnover is obtained out of France in 23 countries

	EDF's capacity of production of electricity (Mwe) in 2021
	France	93,195
	Abroad (26.64%)	33,849
	Europe (16.08%)	20,431
	United Kingdom	10,853
	Italy	5,826
	Belgium	2,047
	America (7%)	8,891
	USA	5,810
	Brazil	1,579
	Asia (3.56%)	4,527
	China	3,417
	All over the world, EDF has proposed its electrotechnological engineering services, for mere advice or for building plants, with hydroelectric power stations like in Brazil in 2019, in Cameroun, Chile, etc, with solar parks (Abu Dhabi) and wind power plants

(n°2 in Italy, a huge park in Arabia, etc.). Its subsidiary RTE International, specialised in high-tension grids, acted in parallel in consulting & audit, technical support, or completion of equipments. Three strongholds emerged, with 30 per cent market-share

  Airports became a target for French companies: the State-controlled ADP (Aéroports de Paris) wished to spread its baskets of skills abroad, whilst Vinci, a public works firm, bet on the revenues of concessions to stabilize its revenues, diversifying from motorways to airports, since 1995 in Cambodia, and mostly since 2013, with ten continental airports of Portugal. Vinci Airports purchased twelve platforms from the US Airports Worldwide in 2018 (Orlando in Florida, other ones in Costa Rica, Sweden, the UK) and succeeded in the UK (London-Gatwick, purchased as a property in 2019), in Japan (Kansaï), or Brazil (seven airports conceded in 2021). It became in 2019 the second worldwide company on that (air-) field of operating airports, behind Spanish AENA and ahead of German Fraport and French ADP, as for the number of transiting passengers (241 million versus 226m). But ADP started to challenge internationally its rival, and commenced prospecting concessions, the first at Santiago-de-Chile (2016), Turkey (46 % of Istanbul airport, 2017), in Jordania (Amman, 2018). ADP International managed thus 28 airports in thirteen countries in 2021.

	Concessions of maritime harbours were also concluded by Bolloré Transport &
	Logistics-a group having prospered since its first paths in 1992 thanks to external and internal growth-in Africa. It managed ports (container terminals and "day ports" connecting maritime and road or railway transport) in several countries (Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, etc.). But it sold this subsidiary to Swiss
	group MSC in 2022 to focus on medias.


Ugo Rizzo
email: ugo.rizzo@unife.it

Valerio Sterzi
email: valerio.sterzi@u-bordeaux.fr

BxWP2022-15

Keywords: University patent, patent value, patent collaboration, Science-Industry University patent, patent value, patent collaboration, Science-Industry JEL codes: O31, O34

In this article, we analyse the characteristics of science-industry patents with respect to noncollaborative industry patents and industry-industry collaborative patents. This analysis covers patents filed in the years 1978-2015 (and granted up to 2020) at the European Patent Office (EPO) in four large European countries (Germany, France, Italy and the UK) and in the US. We consider three dimensions to assess the characteristics of patents: the knowledge base, the technological impact, and the economic value. Science-industry collaborative patents are averagely more sophisticated and similar or higher impact than other industry patents. However, depending on the proxy chosen, they are of similar or lower economic value compared to non-collaborative industry patents and to industry-industry collaborative patents. When we control for the experience of private companies in collaborating with academic institutions, we observe that more experienced collaborations produce slightly less sophisticated and impactful patents, but with higher economic value. We discuss different explanations of these findings.

Introduction 1

Since at the least the 1990s, an apparent paradox has marked the relationship between science and innovation: corporate investments in basic research have either stagnated or declined [START_REF] Arora | The decline of science in corporate R&D[END_REF], but the importance of science as a direct source of new products and process has not ceased to increase, witness the rise of biotechnology and information and communications technology [START_REF] Ahmadpoor | The dual frontier: Patented inventions and prior scientific advance[END_REF]. How to explain these opposite trends? The answer, or at least part of it, lies in the changing role of universities and public research organisations, which have found themselves uniquely well-positioned for producing prototypes and proofs of concepts derived directly from basic research, but with clear applications for product and process innovation [START_REF] Baba | How do collaborations with universities affect firms' innovative performance? The role of "Pasteur scientists" in the advanced materials field[END_REF]. This has allowed business companies, especially large ones, to increasingly replace or couple vertically integrated R&D strategies with openinnovation ones and collaborations with academic scientists not only for hunting for new prototypes and proofs of concepts, but also for developing them (Chesborugh, 2003;[START_REF] Arora | The decline of science in corporate R&D[END_REF]. However, concerns emerged about whether research conducted by universities can be a good substitute for research performed by larger firms [START_REF] Arora | The changing structure of American innovation: Some cautionary remarks for economic growth[END_REF], especially when coordination and transaction costs (and eventually, conflicting interests) are relevant factors.

In the literature, numerous empirical studies support the idea that the interaction with scientific institutions positively influence the innovativeness of companies [START_REF] Jaffe | Real effects of academic research[END_REF][START_REF] Mansfield | Academic research and industrial innovation: An update of empirical findings[END_REF][START_REF] Kaufmann | Science-industry interaction in the process of innovation: the importance of boundary-crossing between systems[END_REF][START_REF] George | The effects of business-university alliances on innovative output and financial performance: a study of publicly traded biotechnology companies[END_REF][START_REF] Lööf | Does knowledge diffusion between university and industry increase innovativeness?[END_REF][START_REF] Yang | Are new technology-based firms located on science parks really more innovative?: Evidence from Taiwan[END_REF][START_REF] Eom | Determinants of industry-academy linkages and, their impact on firm performance: The case of Korea as a latecomer in knowledge industrialization[END_REF]. For instance, [START_REF] Jaffe | Real effects of academic research[END_REF] proved that university research significantly influences the number of corporate patents, especially in science-based sectors. [START_REF] Mansfield | Academic research and industrial innovation: An update of empirical findings[END_REF] found that 15% of new products developed in the US would not be developed without support from academic research in the observed period from 1986 to 1994. [START_REF] Yang | Are new technology-based firms located on science parks really more innovative?: Evidence from Taiwan[END_REF] found that networking with scientific institutions make new technology-oriented companies localised in scientific parks to innovate more than companies outside the parks. 1 All our thanks to Laurent Berge, Catalina Martinez, Francesco Lissoni and Ernest Miguelez for their comments and suggestions. We also gratefully acknowledge funding from the CNRS-CSIC 2018 IRP ALLIES -Associated Laboratory on Linkages between Innovation and Environmental Sustainability https://irp-allies.com/ and from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) (NPEIE Project, no. ANR-17-CE26-0014-01 https://npeie.org). Some results of the paper have been presented at the table ronde -« L'expérience de la recherche collaborative pour les leaders économiques de demain » during the event organized by the CNRS under the "Présidence française de l'Union Européenne (PFUE) and published in the CNRS booklet "From science to society. The value of European Collaboration".

However, when it comes to estimate the precise role of science-industry collaborations (as a form of interaction), results are less clear. On the one hand, some empirical works point toward a positive effect of science-industry collaborations on the innovativeness of companies. For example, [START_REF] Belderbos | Heterogeneity in R&D cooperation strategies[END_REF] have proven that formal collaboration with universities and research institutes improves technological capabilities of R&D activities within companies, as well as their efficiency. On the other hand, other scholars identified a negative or non-significant impact of science-industry research collaborations, especially if compared to other sources of funding and collaborations. For example, using Italian manufacturing companies' data, [START_REF] Medda | Assessing the returns to collaborative research: Firm-level evidence from Italy[END_REF] have shown that research collaborations between firms and universities are not associated to a productivity gain (measured as total factor productivity growth), contrary to collaborations involving only firms. A similar result is found by [START_REF] Jaklič | Relevance of innovation cooperation for firms' innovation activity: The case of Slovenia[END_REF] who, by relying on a sample of Slovenian companies participating in the Community Innovation Surveys from 1996 to 2008, found no effect of collaboration with academic institutes on innovation. Finally, these results were confirmed more recently by Raguž and Mehičić (2017) on a study on Croatian firms.

The different conclusions researchers have reached call for further analysis of the phenomenon. To this purpose, in this article, we focus on science-industry patent collaborations. Despite patent data have some important limitations, 2 they allow to directly assess the value of research collaborations -by relying on observably patent characteristics -, rather than to estimate it only indirectly by relying on innovation and performance indicators at firm level. The purpose is to assess the quality, measured in terms of knowledge base, impact and economic value, of science-industry collaborative patents by comparing them to both non-collaborative industry patents and industryindustry collaborative patents. Moreover, we focus on the role of firms know-how in 2 Patent data have limitations for two reasons. First, patents are not the main channel of science-industry knowledge transfer [START_REF] Agrawal | Putting patents in context: Exploring knowledge transfer from MIT[END_REF][START_REF] Goddard | How do public laboratories collaborate with industry? New survey evidence from France[END_REF]. For example, by using two different surveys in Austria -one among university departments and one among firms - [START_REF] Schartinger | Interactive relations between universities and firms: empirical evidence for Austria[END_REF] find that the most frequent and beneficial knowledge transfers occur through the mobility of human capital, for example via the co-supervision of PhDs. Similarly, by exploiting a database that lists more than 1,000 firms having collaborated with the University Louis Pasteur (ULP) between 1990 and 2002, [START_REF] Levy | An analysis of science-industry collaborative patterns in a large European University[END_REF] find that about 18% of ULP's private partners have signed one or several European contract with the university, while only 8% of ULP's private partners are involved in patenting activity (as co-applicants). Second, the propensity to patent varies across industry [START_REF] Orsenigo | Comparative study of the use of patents in different industries[END_REF], especially when it comes to collaborations: for example, [START_REF] Arundel | Proximity and the use of public science by innovative European firms[END_REF] show that low tech firms rely more on codified sources (such as publications and patents) and research contracts, whereas high tech firms tend to favour channels allowing the transfer of tacit knowledge whereas.

collaborating with universities and public research centres to investigate the role of experience in collaborating with universities with respect to the quality of the collaboration output.

Our results indicate that when technological quality of the underlying invention is considered, science-industry collaborative patents are of higher quality than noncollaborative industry patents and industry-industry collaborative patents. They appear to be more original, more novel, more general and more cited than non-collaborative industry patents. By contrast, when the economic value of the patent is considered, science-industry collaborative patents are of lower value or not significantly different from non-collaborative industry patents. However, our results point out an important role played by the experience in collaborating. In particular, we find that higher level of experience in collaborating with academic institutions are associated to lower technological quality and higher economic value compared to collaborations between academic institutions and companies at the first collaborating experience. In a sense, it is as if experience in collaboration makes the research produced by universities more similar (and substitute) to industrial research.

Our findings provide several contributions to the literature on science-industry collaborations, by unveiling how they may result into innovations characterised by many knowledge spillovers (in line with findings by [START_REF] Petruzzelli | University-Industry collaborations and international knowledge spillovers: a joint-patent investigation[END_REF] but that, however, cannot necessarily substitute research performed by larger firms.

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. In the next section, we briefly review the background literature on how patent data has been utilised to study economic impact and value of inventive activity. Section 3 presents the data and method. Section 4 reports the main econometric results and finally, Section 5 concludes and describes the main limitations of the paper and the potential directions for future research.

Knowledge base, impact and economic value of patented inventions

Innovation can be defined as "a cumulative process, whereby each innovation builds on the body of knowledge that preceded it, and forms in turn a foundation for subsequent advances" (Trajtenberg et al., 1997, p. 20). Patent data provides a rich source of information that makes it possible to investigate a variety of features referred to inventions. In this work we question the characteristics of science-industry collaborations according to three dimensions: the knowledge base, the impact and the economic value. These three features will be proxied by different indicators widely diffused in the literature on patent data. Patents have been widely adopted to study the inventive process and the characteristics of new technologies.

Studying the knowledge components or knowledge base of an invention means to investigate the recombination processes that made the invention came into existence [START_REF] Weitzman | Recombinant growth[END_REF][START_REF] Fleming | Recombinant uncertainty in technological search[END_REF]. Knowledge components can be recombined in different ways, depending on the type of landscape in which the search and combination processes take place [START_REF] Fleming | Technology as a complex adaptive system: evidence from patent data[END_REF]. For instance, according to [START_REF] Fleming | Recombinant uncertainty in technological search[END_REF] and [START_REF] Fleming | Recombinant uncertainty in technological search[END_REF]Sorenson (2001, 2004), combining similar components through a local search process tend to lead with higher probability to a successful output of the combination effort, however most often producing small improvements with respect to the state of the art. Conversely, moving in a distant search process and combining dispersed and distant knowledge bits have less probability of a successful output, but high probability of leading to a breakthrough invention.

Studying the knowledge base of an invention means therefore to investigate its ex-ante characteristics, or the backword processes that lead to the inventive output. A variety of indicators have been proposed in the literature, some of which applied in the context of science-based inventions. The seminal work by [START_REF] Trajtenberg | University versus corporate patents: A window on the basicness of invention[END_REF] stresses the role of the 'importance' of the inventions, and introduce the indicator of originality to measure it. Originality captures the degree of dispersion, across different technological fields, of the knowledge sources on which the invention builds. That is, a higher variety of technological classes belonging to the patents cited in the focal patent indicate the focal invention is of higher complexity [START_REF] Barbieri | Knowledge sources and impacts on subsequent inventions: Do green technologies differ from non-green ones?[END_REF]. Most of the studies applying this indicator to university patents find that these are averagely more original than industry patents, indicating that public patented research results tend to source knowledge from a higher number of different domains [START_REF] Thursby | US faculty patenting: Inside and outside the university[END_REF].

Such findings mirror the consideration that public research tend to be more basic, general and abstract in nature [START_REF] Arora | The changing technology of technological change: general and abstract knowledge and the division of innovative labour[END_REF][START_REF] Trajtenberg | University versus corporate patents: A window on the basicness of invention[END_REF].

In line with these considerations, [START_REF] Fleming | Recombinant uncertainty in technological search[END_REF] argues that combining more diverse and dispersed knowledge components means to undertake more uncertain research and development projects. Greater uncertainty lead to lower chances of obtaining a successful output, however a higher probability of generating breakthrough inventions. [START_REF] Fleming | Science as a map in technological search[END_REF] argue that more uncertain research project have more chances to end successfully when they benefit from scientific method and knowledge, indicating that scientific research is more prone to generate novel or radical inventions compared to industry research [START_REF] Thursby | US faculty patenting: Inside and outside the university[END_REF][START_REF] Rizzo | The division of labour between academia and industry for the generation of radical inventions[END_REF].

Studying the impact means to investigate the ex-post technological influence of inventive activity, that is its role for the development of follow-on innovations.

Investigating the impact of a technology consists in looking at the technological opportunities that an invention is able to spur [START_REF] Schoenmakers | The technological origins of radical inventions[END_REF].

Indeed the impact of an invention is measured in terms of its diffusion as prior art in subsequent inventions and by looking at the variety of sectoral applications in which it is exploited (e.g. [START_REF] Barbieri | Knowledge sources and impacts on subsequent inventions: Do green technologies differ from non-green ones?[END_REF].

Surely the most diffused indicator to measure the impact of an invention is forward citations [START_REF] Hall | Innovation and diffusion of clean/green technology: Can patent commons help[END_REF]Sorenson and Felming, 2004;[START_REF] Bacchiocchi | Knowledge diffusion from university and public research. A comparison between US, Japan and Europe using patent citations[END_REF][START_REF] Dechezleprêtre | Knowledge spillovers from clean and dirty technologies[END_REF][START_REF] Dahlin | When is an invention really radical? Defining and measuring technological radicalness[END_REF][START_REF] Schoenmakers | The technological origins of radical inventions[END_REF][START_REF] Abrams | Patent value and citations: Creative destruction or strategic disruption?[END_REF], widely adopted also to compare university and industry patents [START_REF] Henderson | Universities as a source of commercial technology: a detailed analysis of university patenting, 1965-1988[END_REF][START_REF] Sampat | Changes in university patent quality after the Bayh-Dole act: a re-examination[END_REF][START_REF] Thursby | US faculty patenting: Inside and outside the university[END_REF][START_REF] Sterzi | Patent quality and ownership: An analysis of UK faculty patenting[END_REF][START_REF] Sterzi | Patent management by universities: evidence from Italian academic inventions[END_REF]. The extant literature finds different results about which patents receive more citations: some works, especially based on the US, find universities receive higher number of forward citations compared to industry patents (e.g. [START_REF] Trajtenberg | University versus corporate patents: A window on the basicness of invention[END_REF][START_REF] Sampat | Changes in university patent quality after the Bayh-Dole act: a re-examination[END_REF]; other works find no difference (e.g. [START_REF] Sapsalis | Academic versus industry patenting: An in-depth analysis of what determines patent value[END_REF][START_REF] Thursby | US faculty patenting: Inside and outside the university[END_REF]. Another widely adopted indicator of technological impact is the generality index [START_REF] Hall | Uncovering GPTs with patent data[END_REF][START_REF] Barbieri | Knowledge sources and impacts on subsequent inventions: Do green technologies differ from non-green ones?[END_REF], introduced by [START_REF] Trajtenberg | University versus corporate patents: A window on the basicness of invention[END_REF], which consists in the forward counterpart of originality. It is often adopted to measure the general purposeness of a technology [START_REF] Bresnahan | General Purpose Technologies: 'Engines of Growth[END_REF][START_REF] Hall | Uncovering GPTs with patent data[END_REF]. The generality index measures how distributed across different technological fields are the forward citations of an invention. Most studies applying this indicator to compare university and industry patents tend to recognise a premium for the former [START_REF] Trajtenberg | University versus corporate patents: A window on the basicness of invention[END_REF][START_REF] Henderson | Universities as a source of commercial technology: a detailed analysis of university patenting, 1965-1988[END_REF], again because of the basic, general and abstract nature of public research activities compared to industrial ones.

Finally, the economic value of an invention concerns those aspects unrelated directly to the characteristics of the invention, but that are expression of the quality with respect to the economic feasibility and success of the invention. As Kline and Rosenberg (1986, p. 278) put it: "it is a serious mistake […] to equate economically important innovations with that subset associated with sophisticated technologies" and "technical success is only a necessary and not sufficient condition in establishing economic usefulness".

The economic value reflects the ability of the patent holder to exploit commercially the invention protected by the patent. More valuable patents tend to be renewed more often and to be extended in a higher number of countries [START_REF] Lanjouw | How to count patents and value intellectual property: The uses of patent renewal and application data[END_REF].

Specifically, to the extent that maintaining the patent protection over time is costly, one can assume that any valuable patent pays at least for its own renewal and that the more valuable patents will be renewed for a longer time, conditional on technologyspecific differences in knowledge obsolescence [START_REF] Lanjouw | How to count patents and value intellectual property: The uses of patent renewal and application data[END_REF]. In turn, the number of renewals has been adopted as an indicator of patent economic value [START_REF] Higham | Patent quality: towards a systematic framework for analysis and measurement[END_REF]. Similarly, extending the patent towards more countries, i.e. extending the patent family, is associated with higher costs for the applicant, such as patent office fees, patent attorneys bills and translation costs (Martinez, 2011), and making family size a widely used indicator of the invention economic value (Haroff et al., 2003). These indicators have also been applied to the context of university patents [START_REF] Sterzi | Patent management by universities: evidence from Italian academic inventions[END_REF][START_REF] Cerulli | Do company-owned academic patents influence firm performance? Evidence from the Italian industry[END_REF].

In this work we rely on these indicators to study the three dimensions of knowledge base, impact and value in order to investigate the output of science-industry collaborations and to understand in what terms this output is different from noncollaborative inventions, from industry-industry collaborations, and also from noncollaborative science inventions. The same dimensions will be also put in relation to the experience of firms in collaborating with industry.

Empirical part

Data and key figures

In the analysis we rely on patent datasets provided by the OECD (February 2022 version): the HAN Database, the REGPAT Database and the OECD Patent quality database. Further we rely also on PATSTAT (2021 autumn edition) in order to retrieve the DOCDB patent family identifier and to avoid counting more than once those patent applications belonging to the same patent family. Then, in order to associate our patent-application variables to the patent family we follow the same procedure as in, for example, [START_REF] Verhoeven | Measuring technological novelty with patent-based indicators[END_REF] and [START_REF] Barbieri | Knowledge sources and impacts on subsequent inventions: Do green technologies differ from non-green ones?[END_REF]: we select the highest value within each family.

The analysis focuses on patents applied in the years 1978-2015 (and granted up to 2020) at the European Patent Office (EPO) by industrial firms or public research institutes located in the four largest European countries (Germany, France, Italy and the UK) and in the US. A collaborative patent is defined as a patent with more than one applicant. The applicant is the entity that has the property right to the patent and is responsible (or co-responsible) for the research underlying the patent (or at least its financing). In this analysis, science-industry collaborations are thus defined as collaborative patents involving both firms and academic institutions (universities, public research centres and hospitals). Similarly, industry-industry collaborations are those patents applied by two (or more) different business entities. The type of applicant is retrieved from the EEE-PPAT dataset provided by KU-Leuven. 3 We identify 1,011,147 patent families, of which 917,585 (90.75%) are applied by one firm only ("non-collaborative patents") 4 , 8,211 (0.8%) are co-applied by firms and universities or public research centres ("collaborative: science-industry") and 39,900 (3.95%) are co-applied by two or more firms ("collaborative: industry-industry"). 5 The remaining 45,451 patents (4.5%) are owned by research institutions only ("Science only"). 3 We excluded all patents whose applicants are only individuals or unknown. 4 Some of these patents may however derive from collaborations between university and firm: this happens whenever a university professor transfers the invention autonomously to the private sector or in case of consultancy activities [START_REF] Carayol | The transfer and value of academic inventions when the TTO is one option[END_REF]. 5 Industry-industry collaborative patents may include both joint ventures and collaborations involving subsidiaries belonging to the same group. Three important facts emerge. First, the weight of science-industry collaborative patents as percentage of industry patents has increased over the last 40 years, starting from around 0.1-0.2% in the early Eighties, growing to 0.6% in early Nineties and reaching 1.5% in 2020 (Figure 1). 6 Meanwhile, the share of industry-industry collaborations is more or less stable, slightly decreasing from the Nineties, but yet twice as science-industry collaborations. This indicates that while collaborations among firms are a rather old phenomenon, collaboration between firms and universities is much newer. Second, the largest shares of collaborative patents are in science-based technological fields: in particular, Biotechnology, Analysis of biological materials, Micro-structural and Nano-technology, and Pharmaceuticals are those with the largest share of industry-science collaborative patents, where about 3%-5% of industry patents derive from science-industry collaborations (Figure 2). Third, the share of science-industry collaborative patents varies significantly across the countries considered in the analysis, with France showing the largest share (2%) (Figure 3). The result for France can be in part explained by a relatively large share of French patents owned by universities and public research centers [START_REF] Martinez | University patenting and the quest for technology transfer policy models in Europe[END_REF]. 6 This can be explained both by the increasing propensity of universities and companies to collaborate and by the greater incentive of universities to maintain the intellectual property resulting from the collaborations with the private sector (Martinez and Sterzi, 2020).

Characterising science-industry collaborations

In order to assess the knowledge base, impact and economic value of science-industry collaborative patents, we estimate the following baseline specification:

𝑞 𝛽 𝛽 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝛽 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝛽 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝛽 𝑋 𝐵 𝐵 𝐵 𝐵 𝜀 (1)
where 𝑞 is the standardized (z-score) patent family indicators by filing year and technological field (35-macro classes). As delineated in Section 2, we identify two indicators to measure the knowledge base of inventions: originality and novelty in recombination; two indicators to capture impact: 7-year forward citations and generality; and two indicators proxying for the economic value: family size and renewal. 7 Variables "Industry-Industry", "Science-Industry" and "science only" are dummy variables indicating respectively if the industry patent is co-applied by two or more firms, by (at least) one firm and (at least) one academic institution, or only by one or more academic institutions. The omitted category is the situation in which the patent has been applied for by only one firm ("Non-collaborative patent"). Parameters 𝛽 and 𝛽 identify the premium value associated with the two types of collaborations with respect non-collaborative industry patents, while 𝛽 identifies the premium associated to science only patents. Furthermore, we also include a set of patent family level control variables (𝑋): the number of backward citations and the number of IPCs.

Finally, with some abuse of notation for simplicity, 𝐵 denotes a set of 35 technological classes fixed effects, 𝐵 a set of filing year fixed effects, 𝐵 a set of grant year fixed effect, 𝐵 a set of country fixed effects. Table 1 report descriptive statistics for the variables used in the analysis.

7 All indicators but novelty in recombination are derived from the OECD patent quality dataset [START_REF] Squicciarini | Measuring patent quality: Indicators of technological and economic value[END_REF]; novelty in recombination is a dummy variable taking the value of 1 if the patent is novel and 0 otherwise and is constructed as in [START_REF] Verhoeven | Measuring technological novelty with patent-based indicators[END_REF]. Differently from the other indicators, novelty in recombination has not been standardized by filing year and technological fields. Table 2 shows the regression results based on OLS estimation. Science-industry collaborative patents display 0.09 standard deviations greater in terms of originality, and have 0.8% higher probability of being novel, than non-collaborative industry patents. In terms of knowledge base, science-industry patents reveal to emerge as the outcome of more complex and radical recombinant inventive process compared to non-collaborative patents. Moreover, as it can be seen from the T-test across groups presented in Table 2, science-industry collaborative are also more original and more novel than industry-industry patents, while they are more original but less novel than science-only patents. Overall the collaboration between academic institutions and industry lead to the generation of the most original inventions, and of inventions with a high degree of novelty, second only to pure scientific inventions. The contribution of collaborating with universities in terms of knowledge base is therefore, for collaborating firm, tangible in terms of complexity and novelty of the inventive output.

For what concern the impact of inventions (columns 3 and 4 of Table 2), our results

show that science-industry patents receive 0.04 standard deviations more citations and are 0.14 standard deviations more general than non-collaborative industry patents.

Science-industry collaborative inventions receive a number of forward citations as high as the one of industry-industry collaborations. Conversely they outperform significantly industry-industry patents in terms of generality, scoring a level for this indicator as high as "Science-only" patents. Again the role of university knowledge is visible and mostly related to the basicness of research, that make these patents to diffuse across a wide range of different sector (higher degree of generality). In terms of diffusion towards following technological developments, the contribution is again visible but align the performance of these patents to the other collaborative patents (industry-industry).

Finally, in terms of economic value, science-industry collaborations reveal to be as valuable as or less valuable than non-collaborative industry patents. Specifically, the coefficient of science-industry patents when the dependent variable is renewals is nonsignificant, while it is negative (0.05 standard deviations lower than non-collaborative industry patents) when put in relation to family size. From the t-test shown in Table 2 we can note that science-industry patents are not statistically different from industryindustry patents in terms of renewals, while the latter display higher family-size compared to the former. Conversely both indicators score higher coefficients compared to science-only patents.

In summary, our findings indicate that while the output of science-industry collaborations lead to the generation of highly complex and novel inventions that are also able to produce important impact on subsequent inventive activities, the economic value remains rather low.

Experience in science-industry collaborations

One possible explanation of the fact that science-industry patent collaborations are not of a particularly high economic value is that firms may lack of routines and experiences in collaborating with academic institutions (Petruzelli, 2011). In fact, in order to be (2)

where our main parameters of interest are 𝛽 and 𝛽 that identify the premium value associated with the science-industry collaborations with respect non-collaborative industry patent respectively when firms collaborate with academic institutions for the first time ever or, on the contrary, when firms have already collaborated with academic institutions in the past; 𝛽 identifies the premium value associated with the industryindustry collaborations with respect to non-collaborative industry patents, while 𝛽 the premium associated to the scientific patent with respect to non-collaborative industrial patents.

OLS estimated parameters are shown in Table 3. The economic value of scienceindustry collaborations when it measured by renewals (column 5) tends to remain stable, independently from the experience of the firm in collaborating with academic institutions. Conversely, moving from the first to further experience, the value of science-industry collaborations measured throughout the indicator of family size tend to increase (column 6). Indeed, while first experience science-industry patents have lower family size than non-collaborative industry patents, further collaborations lead to patents with the same level of family size of non-collaborative industry patents.

Overall it is plausible to conclude that science-industry collaborations tend to show higher economic value when the firm has already matured some experience in collaborating with an academic institution.

Looking at the indicator of the knowledge base, our results point out that scienceindustry collaborations at the first experience are more original than science-industry collaborations that involve firms having already maturated some experience in collaborating with academic institutions in the past (column 1). A similar result is also obtained when looking at the novelty in recombination indicator (column 2), although the difference is less significant.

For what concern the impact, science-industry collaborations appear also to be more general when they involve firms at the first experience in science-industry collaborations with respect to firms having already maturated some experience in the past (column 4). However, science-industry collaborations that derive from experienced firms display a higher level of generality with respect both industryindustry collaborations and non-collaborative industry patents. By contrast, experience in science-industry collaboration does not appear playing a significant role when the impact is proxied by the number of 7-year forward citations (column 3):

forward citations of science-industry collaborations are higher than non-collaborative patents, however there is no difference in coefficient between science-industry collaborations, independently of the experience of the firm, and industry-industry collaborations.

Conclusions

In this paper we analyse whether science-industry patent collaborations are associated with a premium in quality with respect non-collaborative industry patents and industry-industry collaborative patents. Three dimensions of patent quality are considered: knowledge base, impact, and economic value.

The analysis shows that science-industry patent collaborations cover inventions that ground on more complex and novel knowledge bases, show higher impacts on on innovation, but that do not reflect in a higher economic value. Inexperience in science-industry collaborations explains only partially this last result: science-industry collaborations involving firms that have already experienced at least one collaboration with academics in the past display a slightly higher economic value with respect to non-collaborative industry patents. Conversely, the knowledge base and impact tend to reduce when firms involved in the science-industry collaborations are involved.

These findings reveal that firms that approach a collaboration with an academic institution for the first time tend to generate very valuable inventions from a technical point of view but lacking economic value. In turn, when they gain experience in collaborating with the science partner, the technicalities tend to decrease in favour of an increased economic value.

The non-correspondence between the technological impact and the economic value of science-industry collaborative patents can be explained by different hypothesis. First, patents are nowadays used for many reasons in addition to protecting an invention from imitation, especially in case of science-industry collaborations, where they may reflect the necessity to clarify the ownership of the invention and to facilitate the knowledge transfer (Helman, 2007). Accordingly, the decision to patent an invention depends often more on the university side (rather than on the company), as universities aim to obtain economic returns from public agencies that view patents as a performance indicator [START_REF] Sterzi | Patent management by universities: evidence from Italian academic inventions[END_REF]Martinez and Sterzi, 2021). Second, firms may prefer to avoid to collaborate with universities for core strategic projects, and that what they do in collaborations is more exploratory: in this case they may renew less (or extend patents in fewer countries) because these patents open new lines of research and lead to subsequent patenting but not to protection of inventions in the market.

Further research is however necessary to validate these interpretations.

In terms of policy implications, these results suggest that corporate research conducted in collaboration with academic institutions can lead to breakthrough innovation in the long term but that may be an imperfect substitute for research performed by firms in the short term, especially when coordination and transaction costs (and eventually, conflicting interests) are relevant factors. Firms should keep investing in in-house basic research rather than simply rely on knowledge acquired from outside to fuel their growth.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Share of collaborative industry patents by year of grant

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Share of science-industry patents by technological fields

Figure 3 .

 3 Figure 3. Share of science-industry patents by country

Table 1 .

 1 Descriptive statistics

	Variable	Obs	Mean	Std. Dev.	Min	Max
	Non collaborative	1,011,147	.907	.29	0	1
	Science only	1,011,147	.045	.207	0	1
	Science-industry	1,011,147	.008	.09	0	1
	Industry-industry	1,011,147	.039	.195	0	1
	Originality	993,445	.666	.241	0	.989
	Novelty in	1,011,147	.135	.341	0	1
	recombination
	Generality	420,769	.353	.281	0	.946
	Forward citations	1,011,147	1.215	2.877	0	624
	Renewal	1,011,147	11.369	4.638	1	29
	Family size	1,011,147	6.508	4.547	1	57
	Backward citations	1,011,147	5.652	7.511	0	300
	Number IPCs	1,011,147	4.275	4.144	1	100

Table 2 .

 2 Characteristics of science-industry collaborations (OLS regression) Note. Estimated parameters 𝛽 and 𝛽 from the baseline specification (1); robust standard errors in parenthesis: Sign: ***99%, **95%, *90%. All patent indicators, except novelty, are standardized by 35-class technological fields and filing years. The omitted category consists of non-collaborative industry patents.

			Knowledge base	Impact	Economic value
			(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)	(6)
			Originality	Novelty in recombination	Forward citations	Generality Renewal	Family size
	Industry-industry (𝛽 )	0.0396***	-0.00986***	0.0524***	0.0166**	-0.0113**	0.0603***
			(0.00485)	(0.00159)	(0.00532)	(0.00768)	(0.00495)	(0.00505)
	Science-industry (𝜷 𝟐 )	0.0888***	0.00775**	0.0443***	0.138***	0.00567	-0.0530***
			(0.0107)	(0.00329)	(0.0127)	(0.0165)	(0.0105)	(0.0106)
	Science only (𝛽 )	0.0538***	0.0163***	-0.0283***	0.134***	-0.114***	-0.254***
			(0.00511)	(0.00153)	(0.00484)	(0.00777)	(0.00495)	(0.00448)
	Backward citations	0.216***	0.00182***	0.106***	0.0228***	0.0265***	0.0485***
			(0.00155)	(0.000342)	(0.00245)	(0.00138)	(0.000922) (0.00119)
	Number IPCs	0.183***	0.121***	0.119***	0.158***	0.0283***	0.146***
			(0.000944)	(0.000426)	(0.00156)	(0.00143)	(0.000932) (0.00118)
	Constant		-0.00980***	0.134***	-0.00115	-0.0294*** 0.00551*** 0.00946***
			(0.00101)	(0.000318)	(0.00102)	(0.00161)	(0.00101)	(0.00102)
	T-test: 𝛽	𝛽	17.8***	23.8***	0.35	45.9***	2.16	95.4***
	T-test: 𝛽	𝛽	9.0***	5.8**	29.4***	0.06	110***	323***
	Filing year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Grant year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Technology FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Country FE		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Observations	993,445	1,011,147	1,011,142	420,767	1,011,147	1,011,145
	R-squared		0.096	0.207	0.037	0.038	0.062	0.066
	F		12635***	16427***	1729***	2705***	504.3***	4222***

Table 3 .

 3 Characteristics of science-industry collaborations (OLS regression) All patent indicators, except novelty, are standardized by 35-class technological fields and filing years. The omitted category consists of non-collaborative industry patents.

			Knowledge base	Impact	Economic value
			(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)	(6)
			Originality	Novelty in recombination	Forward citations	Generality Renewal	Family size
	Industry-industry (𝛽 )	0.0395***	-0.00986***	0.0523***	0.0164**	-0.0114**	0.0603***
			(0.00485)	(0.00159)	(0.00532)	(0.00768)	(0.00495)	(0.00505)
	Science-industry
	first collab (𝜷 𝟐 )	0.103***	0.00988**	0.0313**	0.161***	0.00922	-0.101***
			(0.0133)	(0.00416)	(0.0152)	(0.0201)	(0.0127)	(0.0124)
	Science-industry
	further collab (𝜷 𝟑 )	0.0618***	0.00441	0.0378*	0.0777***	-0.0186	0.0227
			(0.0184)	(0.00531)	(0.0195)	(0.0291)	(0.0187)	(0.0191)
	Science only (𝛽 )	0.0538***	0.0163***	-0.0286***	0.134***	-0.114***	-0.254***
			(0.00511)	(0.00153)	(0.00484)	(0.00777)	(0.00495)	(0.00448)
	Backward citations	0.216***	0.00182***	0.106***	0.0228***	0.0265***	0.0485***
			(0.00155)	(0.000342)	(0.00245)	(0.00138)	(0.000922) (0.00119)
	Number IPCs	0.183***	0.121***	0.119***	0.158***	0.0283***	0.146***
			(0.000944)	(0.000426)	(0.00156)	(0.00143)	(0.000932) (0.00118)
	Constant		-0.00979***	0.134***	-0.00105	-0.0294*** 0.00557*** 0.00950***
			(0.00100)	(0.000318)	(0.00102)	(0.00161)	(0.00101)	(0.00102)
	T-test: 𝛽	𝛽	20.3***	19.9***	1.71	45.7***	2.31	146***
	T-test: 𝛽	𝛽	1.38	6.69***	0.52	4.19**	0.14	3.66*
	T-test: 𝛽	𝛽	3.30*	0.66	0.07	5.64**	1.52	29.9***
	Filing year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Grant year FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Technology FE	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Country FE		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
	Observations	993,445	1,011,147	1,011,142	420,767	1,011,147	1,011,145
	R-squared		0.096	0.207	0.037	0.038	0.062	0.067
	F		10529***	13689***	1441***	2254***	420.5***	3524***
	Note. Estimated parameters 𝛽 , 𝛽 , 𝛽 and 𝛽 from specification (2); robust standard errors in parenthesis: Sign: ***99%,
	**95%, *90%.