Carnot Spirit

Carnot label, Charter and Network

The Carnot label is intended to support partnership research, in research works lead by public laboratories in partnership with socio-economic actors (mainly companies).

Research partnership development is an important objective of the French gouvernment in order to boost innovation and companies competitiveness.

The Carnot label is received for a 5 years renewable period by public research laboratories, called Carnot institutes, which lead both long-term theoritical research activities suitable to renew their scientific and technological competencies and an active policy regarding partnership research to the socio-economic actors benefit.

Each Carnot institute has its own gouvernance structure and an internal organization supporting the development of a long-term quality partnership research. The Carnot institutes respect the terms of the Carnot Charter describing the Carnot network spirit and ethics:

• establishment of a continuous improvement process to conduct research projects with a professionalism reflecting firms and socio-economic actors expectations,
• definition of a research strategy including clear socio-economic actors expectations and expected technological ruptures,
• answer systematically at the requests of the partners, possibly by directing them towards another structure of research,
• for researchers and laboratories evaluations, taking into account their involvements in partnership research projects,
• development of strong and long-term relationships with academic research in order to strengthen the scientific and technological competencies renewals,
• promotion of the Carnot label, synonymouswith quality,professionnalism,opening and consideration for socio-economic partners expectations,
• partnership development within the Carnot network and with other European research technology organizations (RTO) in order to propose multi-fields integrated offers to industrial partners.

When it is labellized, each Carnot institute has to respect a few objectives of progress. In order to achieve these objectives, it receives financial support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). The amount of  received funds is based on the volume of partnerial research lead with socio-economic partners. These objectives aim are:
- ensuring scientific resourcing,
- improving institutes' professionalism (projects management, intellectual property, ...),
- developping partnership with companies,
- improving the Carnot network integration..

In 2010 a financial support of 60M€ is devoted for the Carnot device . 

The Carnot institutes keep their own status and autonomous management  but they are gathered within the Carnot network lead by Association des instituts Carnot (AiCarnot).

AiCarnot is in charge of the network animation and the Carnot institutes partnerial research promotion. Therefore, it runs collective actions to the Carnot institutes benefit: communication actions, best practices sharing, support for developping of Carnot "standards" in order to ensure the quality associated to the label, companies entry point, actions towards SMEs, inter-institutes synergies development in order to improve the network integration (multi-institutes scientific resourcing projects, multi-fields projects management), international actions development, …