Inside the Municipal Fast Lane: What Startups Actually Gain From Joining a City-Transition Program
By Manon Vasseur · 3 min read
Manon Vasseur
Founding Editor · Nantes
Manon founded The Loupe because too many stories get filed with a headline and a verdict, and the part in between gets left out. She edits most of what runs here and pushes writers to show their work rather than just their conclusions. She spends a fair amount of her own time chasing down the original document behind a claim.
Articles
The Hidden Balance Sheet of France's Urban Startup Bet
Beyond funding and mentorship, urban-transition programs offer founders something rarer: a real-world testing ground where public infrastructure meets private innovation.
By Manon Vasseur · 3 min read
The Subscription City: Can Recurring Revenue Fix Public Innovation?
As French municipalities struggle to fund digital and environmental upgrades, a new financing logic borrowed from software companies is quietly reshaping how innovation programs sustain themselves.
By Manon Vasseur · 3 min read
France's Quiet Bet on Territorial Incubators
As French cities scramble to reconcile digital ambition with ecological constraint, a new generation of place-based accelerators is emerging. The Ville de Demain program offers a useful case study in how public-private structures are trying to close the gap between innovation and implementation.
By Manon Vasseur · 3 min read
Territory as Infrastructure: How France's Urban Incubators Are Rewiring Public Innovation
A growing network of place-based incubators is challenging the assumption that innovation must flow from capital to periphery. France's Ville de Demain program offers a case study in what happens when acceleration logic meets municipal ambition.
By Manon Vasseur · 3 min read
The Quiet Rewrite of Cookie Consent
Regulators spent years building the cookie consent wall, and the ad industry spent the same years quietly building a door around it.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
The Civil Servant Who Actually Runs Trade Policy
Ministers make the announcements; a small, largely anonymous layer of career officials makes the decisions that stick.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
No, Electric Vehicles Do Not 'Emit More Than Diesel' Over Their Lifetime
The claim resurfaces with every major EV policy announcement, and it consistently misreads the evidence it pretends to cite.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
The Return of Industrial Policy, and What It Quietly Walked Back In
Governments rediscovering the power of the state to direct investment have also, less visibly, rediscovered its power to pick winners.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
Groundwater Is Disappearing, and Most Water Policy Ignores It
The world's most important water source sits below the debate entirely, invisible, unregulated, and running low.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
How 'Efficiency' Became the Word That Ends Conversations
Efficiency is the policy world's most powerful rhetorical move, because it sounds technical, neutral, and beyond argument, and is usually none of those things.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
The '8 Glasses of Water a Day' Rule Has No Scientific Basis
One of the most repeated health recommendations in the world appears to trace back to a misreading, a rounding error, and decades of unquestioned repetition.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read
Maintenance Is the Infrastructure Spending Nobody Wants to Fund
Every ribbon-cutting conceals a balance sheet of deferred repairs, and deferred repairs have a way of becoming very expensive emergencies.
By Manon Vasseur · 2 min read