The ECRIN Association, a non-for-profit organisation created in 1990, is the offspring of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Centre d’Etudes Atomiques (CEA). The letters ECRIN stand for “Echange et Collaboration Recherche-INdustrie”.

Objectives:

The core of ECRIN’s missions consists in facilitating and amplifying collaborations, synergies and partnership between research laboratories (public and private) and industries, in a multidisciplinary context. The aim is to anticipate and enhance the transfer of technological processes from one sector to another, thus increasing the opportunities to create new market values and employment. Innovation is the key word.

ECRIN offers a framework which guarantees the objectivity and the neutrality that must preside in all its activities. Experts, decision makers, from a vast diversity of disciplines and various origins, can thus share their ideas and discuss freely and creatively together, on pre-selected subjects, without any pressure. Researchers of the public or private sector, representatives of major companies or SMEs, others from the ministries or professional institutions, can put their brains together to study emergent subjects which might be apt to play a significant role in tomorrow’s economy. Most subjects, besides their technological methodologies, call for the intervention of a number of different approaches: from foresight, economical analyses, environmental and health impact assessment to the questioning of societal issues.

Domains of expertise:

The subjects studied within ECRIN are linked to the requests of its members, and to some extent to the expertise available among the ECRIN staff. The principal domains to date are the following ones:

• Food and agriculture
• Biology, biotechnologies and health
• Energy
• Environment
• Materials and processes
• Optoelectronics
• Organization and society
• Risks
• Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
• Transports

Deliverable list