CIR is a huge joke, it doesn't help small companies that much. Big companies are far better at collecting it than start-ups.
On paper, CIR is for research and development efforts, basically it's for efforts that improve the state of the art.
But in practice CIR is a tax break/subvention in disguise for medium to big french companies like Orange, Thales, bnpparibas...
Just to give you an idea, at one of my former job, an email was sent to every employee of the division. This email asked us to provide our CV rewritten with "research terms" (ex: replace implementing by prototyping, debugging by experimenting, etc). We were CIRing projects in pure maintenance, we were CIRing the same thing over and over each years. It was clearly abusive.
I've heard stories that are even worst than that, like banks CIRing an overall of their website.
It's even worse than that because CIR is correlated to having people with the highest degree, which creates a perverse incentive to have over-qualified staff. It subsidizes long studies implicitely and distort the job market.
Regarding the CIR abuse, in my first internship at Bull, my colleagues had to log a part of their time as "research", whatever they were doing (usually maintenance or development), in order to claim for CIR.
On paper, CIR is for research and development efforts, basically it's for efforts that improve the state of the art.
But in practice CIR is a tax break/subvention in disguise for medium to big french companies like Orange, Thales, bnpparibas...
Just to give you an idea, at one of my former job, an email was sent to every employee of the division. This email asked us to provide our CV rewritten with "research terms" (ex: replace implementing by prototyping, debugging by experimenting, etc). We were CIRing projects in pure maintenance, we were CIRing the same thing over and over each years. It was clearly abusive.
I've heard stories that are even worst than that, like banks CIRing an overall of their website.