5.1.1. Dissonant work schedules between companies and laboratories

In all of the organizations observed during the survey, time lags, particularly between laboratories and companies, were revealed. In this respect, one company director confided the difference in approach to a CIFRE thesis between her company (which employed the PhD student) and the partner laboratory located in the cluster (which supervised the scientific process):

As a result, this is really felt in the contractual exchange that we have with this CIFRE thesis. On their side it’s cool. We need to make progress within six months in order to market something. It’s really two different ways of looking at the thesis… (Interview with Sylvie, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, June 2015).

This interview extract highlights a gap and scheduling problems that may emerge from this shared postgraduate research, where the PhD student is at the interface between science and industry (Levy 2005). These differences in temporality are generally found, between science and industry, at the time of cementing relationships:

Probably because what we do is still very academic. There is a gap to be bridged between the results we produce and those required by industry […]. We are not at all in an industrial process. We test enzymes and substrates. If they are varied, we find activities that are more or less significant, or may or may not be marginal. Afterwards, what are industrialists going to do with these enzymes? […] There is a whole development process that follows, that we cannot assume, because it is not our job […]. Manufacturers want an immediate response to their needs. That we are not able to provide (Interview with Patrick, research institute director, September 2015).

These words echo the work that shows that universities and companies are founded on different systems of action and norms, with open science evaluated by peers, on the one hand, and proprietary science evaluated by the market that seeks to profit from scientific results, on the other hand (Dasgupta and David 1994). Although theoretical models have long been used to describe coordination mechanisms between scientific and industrial communities as “boundary objects” (Star and Griesemer 1989) or “transaction fields” (Galison 1997), the Genopole survey and the network analysis carried out reveal phenomena of incommunicability. These are directly linked to different visions and ways of doing things. Science has a primarily operational value for industry, whereas in academic research, even though the market is increasingly present, researchers maintain an ethos marked by the universal and general interest nature of knowledge (Merton 1996). Moreover, the university pursues three missions (education, research and valorization), but the evaluation of its workers focuses on research that has resulted in publication (Gastaldi and Lanciano-Morandat 2017).

On the industrial side, the speed with which they must renew themselves in a globalized economy leads them to abandon certain scientific applications in the search for immediate profitability (Uzunidis 2003, p. 69). The example of shared platforms (see Chapter 4) shows that, although they are shared workspaces, they merely accommodate the different professional logics of the organizations accredited by the cluster. In particular, this is a domestic use for laboratories, which allows them to have access to expensive equipment. This use is also valid for the companies in the cluster, but coupled with an opportunistic use of equipment for commercialization purposes (Aggeri et al. 2007a, p. 121). Moreover, the timeframes also seem to differ between firms, depending on whether or not they are in the development phase. In this regard, let us listen to this company director who suggests a categorization of structures and associated logics:

We all have our own agendas, our own way of doing things, so we don’t work together […]. Perhaps, also, because, as they are start-ups, they are often chasing the same markets. There is a kind of rivalry between them, competition for investors […]. We’re a little bit different… You’d have to segment the Genopole into pure start-ups, pure university labs, commercial enterprises, etc. […]. I think everyone works very differently (Interview with Philippe, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, December 2014).

As a result, the institutional logic of the cluster, which seeks to bring the different logics together, comes up against this segmentation. The cluster’s intermediation structure does not escape its own administrative timeframes either, which appear to be unsuitable, especially in the eyes of companies:

Genopole is structured, but structuring means administrative slowness. Clearly, the operation we were able to set up in 2002 was completed very quickly, in four months. If the same operation were to be launched today, it would a priori take at least a year. So Genopole’s responsiveness has slowed considerably […]. And the reality is that a biotech company has to make decisions extremely quickly. Genopole’s timelines are not compatible with what Genopole can offer […]. Everything has to go through tenders, etc. (Interview with Alexandre, accredited company director, September 2015).

Beyond the bureaucratic considerations linked to the organizational structure of the cluster, this company director also stresses that Genopole’s objectives may not match those of the accredited members, as in the case of the biocluster’s strategic orientation committee (Comité d’Orientation Stratégique du Biocluster, COSEB) which brings together company and laboratory directors:

Originally, COSEB was set up without any specifications, but little by little Genopole directed it towards defining the Genopole 2025 strategy. However, the people on COSEB did not have the skills to define what biotechnology might look like in 2025, given that they were thinking in terms of two to three years, not ten to fifteen. So there was a completely incompatible delta between what Genopole wanted and the people who were elected to the COSEB (Interview with Alexandre, accredited company director, September 2015).

In this extract, we note the distinction between the temporal perspective, in which the public intermediation structure is positioned, and that of the COSEB representatives where, as a reminder, 8 out of the 17 elected members are company managers.

Finally, we note another temporality within a structuring actor of the cluster: the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (AFM). The various interviews and observations conducted within the association show a particular attachment of employees to their institution. Many of them consider that they combine their professional activity with their activism in the fight against Muscular Dystrophy. In this respect, the Telethon is an event that punctuates the life and temporality of the association every year. From September to January, employees are highly mobilized and have little time for outside exchanges. Let us listen to a communication officer who expresses the time and moral investment:

When you come to the AFM now (in July) and when you come to the AFM in October, there are two different worlds, there’s a real pressure behind it. I arrived in August, so I had three weeks of integration and from September onwards it was crazy! It’s too much pressure, you know that there are children waiting for you to do better, we’re not alone, I mean, you know that behind it there are lives […]. And then you have key events during the year that remind you why you are there. There’s the Telethon, you’re ready, you’re all over the place, you’re stressed, you don’t really see what’s going on, you don’t really take the time to talk to people. Whereas on Family Day in June, you have all the families around you, you can talk to them and then you understand why you are there; I think that’s also what keeps you going (Interview with Jeanne, communications officer at AFM, July 2015).

In this interview extract, we note that in addition to the Telethon, which takes up the teams’ time over several months, the AFM regularly holds other federating events in the fight against muscular dystrophy, such as the Family Day. This event is used as a reminder of the purpose of the moral commitment of employees to the families of sick children.

In the end, we observe a desynchronization of temporalities that is particularly embodied in the distinction between the scientific time of laboratories and the commercial time to which companies are subject. In addition, alongside these two structuring temporalities, we also observe associative time, through the activist nature of the AFM, which imposes a particular annual rhythm with the collection of donations, and the administrative time of the intermediation structure centered on the issues of convergence between differentiated actors. It is also possible to add the medical time of the nearby Southern Paris Region Hospital (Centre Hospitalier Sud Francilien), where the priority remains care. Indeed, the few interviews conducted at the hospital show that the temporality of the institution is dedicated to the care of patients and dissociated from entrepreneurial and scientific logics.

5.1.2. Belonging to the large biotechnology family or disciplinary demarcation logics?

In addition to this temporal dissonance between distinct social fields, all of the structures seem to be confronted, whether between laboratories and companies, within companies or within laboratories, by a distinction between fields of activity, which would partly explain the lack of cooperation between structures. Indeed, the lack of common interest is materialized, on several occasions, by the fact that the disciplines are too distinct:

I think the themes are so distinct that the interactions are quite difficult… Let’s say we have an approach… We work on plants and we are the only ones. After that, what can bring us closer together is the high-throughput sequencing aspect, from a technological point of view, where there may be certain similarities. The others are very health-oriented and not so into plants (Interview with Maximilien, accredited laboratory research engineer, November 2014).

This distinction between disciplines is particularly noticeable in the accredited organizations that do not work in health-related biotechnologies, which are the cluster’s original domains. As a result, individuals who work in different fields do not feel included in the seminars and conferences organized:

We’re focused on agri, whereas Genopole is, broadly speaking, focused on human health. As a result, most of the seminars focus on molecular biology, quite heavy stuff, health approaches, etc. (Interview with Nora, marketing manager at a biocluster-accredited company, November 2014).

This company, which develops technologies based on plant genetic manipulation, does not see its place in the overly generalized field of biotech. Without it being possible to establish a definite cause and effect relationship, this company left the biocluster 2 years after the interview with this marketing manager. The distinction between disciplines is not only felt in companies and laboratories working in the plant sector. It can also be felt in organizations in the health field:

I was wondering about moving to Cochin. They have a business center and, when you see the list of companies, these are people you can talk to because it’s clearly biomedical […]. Genopole is about genes and cells and, in fact, it’s a bit of everything. There are people who make viruses, therapeutics, molecular analysis kits, etc., so we don’t interact with them much (Interview with Sylvie, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, June 2015).

The “little bit of everything” in this director’s words is symptomatic of public research policies that promote interdisciplinarity. Indeed, LABEX (Laboratories of Excellence), IDEX (Excellence Initiatives) and even the recent I-SITE (Initiatives for Science, Innovation, Territories and Economy) are emblematic of these interdisciplinary policies to bring science and industry closer together. These public innovation policies are reconfigured around “major programs articulated around keywords whose definition is elusive: ‘nanotechnology’, ‘biotechnology’, or ‘neuroscience’ and ‘genomics’” (Fallon and Thoreau 2016, p. 17). These very broad headings cover different practices and disciplines that share a relatively low common denominator:

The principle of Genopole is to say, “We’re going to bring in good scientists, we’re going to put them together and we think they will gel”. But that’s not true, that is not how it works, if you just take the example of bioinformatics, there are procedures, methods, tools that are specific to statisticians. They don’t have the same brains as geneticists! So, can you imagine when you have to explain what you do to a guy who only talks about business? (Interview with Gérard, accredited laboratory teacher-researcher, May 2014).

In the case of biotechnology and genomics, the common denominator is the manipulation of life. But, as we saw in the previous extract, misunderstandings can emerge between biostatisticians and geneticists, even though they all work on living organisms. Some even speak of a “gulf” between the different activities of the site, which would greatly limit the mutual interest in creating collaborations. From this point of view, it appears that the objective of restructuring public research as a whole, organized around major application areas (health, energy, etc.) to the detriment of disciplinary research (Hubert and Louvel 2012), is meeting with resistance.

These disciplinary qualifications, such as biotechnology, or identity qualifications, such as the creative class, therefore mask a diversity of fields of activity and different individual and collective practices. The observation developed here is largely in line with the position of Jean-Pierre Durand, who sees in Richard Florida’s creative class, not a “class in itself” with similar conditions and lifestyle, but an amalgam of intellectual occupations (Durand 2016). Moreover, the professionals of the creative class would, according to Durand, still not be aware of a common belonging and would therefore not constitute a “class for its own sake”. This idea tends to be corroborated by the survey conducted at Genopole. Although the majority of the cluster’s workers are highly qualified, their positions in the social space, as well as the social fields to which they belong, differ greatly. As Jean-Pierre Durand rightly says, Florida adopts a substantialist definition of social classes, based on the content of their members’ activities. The following two points are intended to shine a less homogeneous light on the different workers studied, who will therefore be analyzed according to the field to which they belong and the position they occupy within that field.

5.2.1. A workforce that is becoming precarious

Anti-differentiationist theses have developed in opposition to that of Robert K. Merton (Lamy and Shinn 2006, p. 24). In Merton’s conception, science is seen as a social structure in its own right, made up of norms and modes of regulation, thanks to the concept of ethos, which makes science an institution distinct from the rest of society (Merton 1996, p. 223). He asserts that scientific ethos accounts for a scientific community animated by the development of science. Gradually, work that took science as its objective called this approach into question in favor of developing the idea of science as a pre-capitalist market activity (Hagstrom 1965). This individualistic view of scientists emphasizes the search for recognition by peers. Hagstrom sees, in the commitment of researchers (contribution to a journal or to a communication), a gift that calls for a counter-gift (recognition). Although far from individualist paradigms, Bourdieu also breaks with the idea of a scientific community driven solely by a common objective of scientific progress. Through his notion of social field, he views the scientific community as a space of struggles between researchers. He sees science as a social field like any other, with power relations, strategies, interests and so on. Researchers are therefore in competition to obtain, not just recognition, but the monopoly of scientific authority. The field of science is therefore understood as follows:

A system of objective relations between acquired positions, the scientific field is an area of competitive struggle, whose specific stake is the monopoly of scientific authority, inseparably defined as technical capacity and social power, or, if one prefers, the monopoly of scientific competence, understood in the sense of the capacity to speak and act legitimately (in other words, authoritatively and with approval) in matters of science, which is socially recognized to a determined agent (Bourdieu 1976, p. 89).

In this vision of the scientific world, researchers produce and interact in order to increase their social and symbolic capital. To scientific recognition and authority, Latour and Woolgar add credibility in terms of the ability of researchers to convert one capital into another, for example, the conversion of scientific facts into grants (Latour and Woolgar 2006). Like capitalist entrepreneurs, the greater the accumulation of a stock of credibility, the greater the researcher’s ability to increase his capital.

If we continue the Bourdieusian reasoning in terms of a social field, within these struggles and power relations, we see the appearance of the dominators and the dominated. In his thesis (Heil 2010), Christophe Heil identifies two types of workers in university research laboratories, both of which are affected, in differing degrees, by the growing insecurity of university staff: the “long-term temps” and the “insecure academics”. The former are characterized by the accumulation of statuses that usually “should only be temporary leading to permanent positions, they follow one after the other until they finally end up at a professional dead end” (Heil 2010, p. 355). He thus refers to the statuses of fellow, lecturer, training and research assistant (ATER), paid unemployment at the end of the ATER contract and a number of postgraduate positions. While it was less present in France than in the United States, the use of postgraduates is becoming more widespread, particularly in the life sciences (Hubert and Louvel 2012, p. 23). This extension of short-term status and limited remuneration can also be observed in the cluster, mainly through the large number of people with postgraduate degrees. Of the 22 PhD graduates who responded to the questionnaire, 14 completed it with a post-doc. The same is true for the interviews conducted with 12 PhDs, half of whom also had a post-doctorate. This succession has become the norm and freezes, for years, precarious statuses that were imagined as transitory. During an informal exchange, a doctor in biology even mentioned the obligatory nature of this status: “Without a post-doctorate, you can’t have a career in research”, he said. The tenure track then moves backwards from year to year. For example, at the CNRS, the average recruitment age for researchers has increased from 32.9 years in 2007 to 34.2 years in 2015¹. Temporary workers represent up to two-thirds of the teaching staff: “Scientific research only stands because it relies on an army of contract workers, temporary workers and out-of-work doctors” (Granger 2015, p. 13). In particular, 2014 saw two trials emblematic of the situation of these insecure researchers. INSERM was condemned by the Nantes Administrative Court for not having renewed the position of an engineer after 11 years of successive fixed-term contracts. The institute was obliged, following the lawsuit, to proceed with a tenure. The same fate befell the Institute of Myology, the same year, which did not wish to grant a tenure to one of its researchers who had accumulated 7 years of temporary contracts.

These phenomena are particularly the result of a new division of labor linked to project-based funding (see section 5.2.2), which implies that permanent staff develop projects and seek funding while temporary staff move the scientific tasks of the laboratory forward. The latter then see their activity remunerated by the research contracts obtained by the former (Hubert and Louvel 2012, p. 23). In this system, if it works at all, the eventual tenure of young PhDs often depends on the arbitration of the incumbents and can thus encourage clientelistic logics, as explained by a bioinformatics PhD student encountered during the survey:

At first I went into academic research for the sake of science in the noblest sense of the word, if you will, and in fact I discovered a whole world… where it is the race to publish and network to secure a position. I was just discussing this with a friend who is not in that field at all and I was saying that it is the “prostitution of research”! (Interview with Anastasia, bioinformatics PhD student in an accredited laboratory, September 2015).

In this competitive context of access to positions, young PhDs are increasingly turning away from a scientific career, given the involvement in the work and the time availability that the path to tenure implies. In Belgium, the experienced or expected difficulty in balancing work and family life would dissuade 50% of female PhDs and 27% of male PhDs from continuing in a scientific career (Meulders et al. 2012). Moreover, the recognition and professionalization of the status of worker in laboratories is a particularly long process. Through an ethnographic survey of chemistry and biology PhD students, Louvel shows that they find themselves in formalized hierarchical relationships, obliged to work in the laboratory, at their bench and respecting the institution’s schedules (Louvel 2006). In this context, they are seen more as future colleagues than as young researchers in their own right. Indeed, they are considered as students who will sooner or later integrate into the research environment, while paradoxically they assume a large part of the laboratory’s work. In fact, PhD students in the life sciences represent 30% of the qualified workforce mobilized in the scientific production of laboratories, whereas only 25% of them are recruited each year after receiving their doctorate (Mangematin 2003).

As a result, capital and habitus are different between permanents and contractuals, which gives rise to a struggle similar to that observed in private companies, where the dominated “peripheral employees” (fixed-term contracts, temporary workers, involuntary part-time work, etc.) try to join the dominant group, the “core employees” (permanent contracts and full-time workers) (Durand 2012). Thus, the group is far from being homogenic, admittedly subject on the whole to budget reduction logics, but whose consequences vary significantly according to status.

5.2.2. Scientific work destabilized and concealed by competition

For their part, tenured staff benefit from a strong statutory protection, but are also affected by a certain insecurity, linked to a double movement of managerialization (performance, competition, productivity) and bureaucratization (procedures, budgetary control, etc.) in research and higher education (Gastaldi and Lanciano-Morandat 2017). Since the creation of the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR) in 2005, they have been subject to the logic of calls for projects. The annual setting of research themes deemed to be priorities has lead to a generalized competition between researchers on the national market for research funding. This requires skills that are not strictly scientific and that not all researchers have mastered. Responses to calls for proposals are no longer considered as a bonus, but as a prerequisite for scientific practice. This system progressively weakens the members of the academic field who are forced to seek external funding in a context of rapid turnover of calls for projects. However, it seems that it is more a question of a transformation in the realization of scientific work than social and economic insecurity of these workers, whom Heil calls “insecure academics”. Indeed, their position is not threatened, either in terms of their remuneration or duration, which is not the case for ATER or postgraduate positions. On the contrary, the system of calls for tender or projects does shape the way research is approached. Indeed, this form of project-based work gives way to “managementism” that encroaches on scientific production, as workers are forced to be accountable, through administrative procedures, and leads to short-term applied research (Goussard and Tiffon 2013). Moreover, the project must meet the requirements formulated by the funding agency and gives rise to a series of phenomena that constrain the researcher even more. The deadlines’ and conditions’ set effectively disrupts the researcher’s work rhythm and their determination of scientific questions. Moreover, the demand for results leads them to detail the stages of their work, whereas research is intrinsically linked to uncertainty. Finally, this demand pushes them to investigate fields that are already marked out, which minimizes risk-taking. Some see the disappearance of a system based on recurrent credits as making it even more difficult for researchers to (re)originate new theories (Heil 2010, p. 391).

Project-based funding is effectively replacing the collective budgetary policy of laboratories, that is, the common pot that allows management to decide collegially on the orientation of resources (Hubert and Louvel 2012, p. 19). This changeover then individualizes the funding that will be granted to a researcher or to teams that have mastered the code of the call for projects. It therefore promotes the emergence of management professionals. Researchers are thus individually led to become “competition bureaucrats” (Granger 2015, p. 106) and managers of their “small academic company […] with a budget to spend, a team to work with, deadlines to meet, and reports to compile” (Gastaldi and Lanciano-Morandat 2017).

In addition to calls for proposals, these values of competition and rivalry are fostered by the increasingly important role played by performance indicators that disrupt the scientific ethos (Piron 2008). These indicators cover multiple dimensions, such as productivity in terms of publication, measured by journal rankings or by the calculation of bibliometric indicators. This competition is in action in the scientific work practices of the cluster studied. The constitution of a group of PhD students from different laboratories at the time of the survey highlighted the instructions that were given not to divulge any information. Indeed, students receive official instructions from their laboratories, formalized in the signing of confidentiality agreements concerning their results, which stipulate that only published results can be presented to the outside world. In addition, unofficial instructions from their superiors are distilled within the teams. In particular, the students report the strong competition that exists within teams and which leads to the presentation of only positive results that condition the funding of the teams at departmental meetings. The results are therefore concealed, which, at best, leads to waste (duplication of vectors, antibodies, non-sharing of protocols) and, at worst, to cases of sabotage such as cellular contamination. The phenomena of withholding information, between laboratories and also between research teams belonging to the same institution, are thus very present. Some research team leaders give instructions, particularly to young researchers, not to reveal the progress of their work to their colleagues in neighboring teams. This is done through several strategies: coded presentations in front of peers, even the dissemination of false information, or the prohibition to participate in conferences without hierarchical authorization or without having published beforehand:

If I want to talk about something outside, we have a disclosure form. So we have to say, “I’m going to present this at a meeting, it’s already been patented and we’re about to publish it’, so there it’s validated. If it’s new and I’ve never talked about it, it can’t come out, but, even if I’m going to make a presentation in front of collaborators, I have to say that I’m going to disclose something, it goes in front of the R&D manager. This is new, in the last year, because they realized that people were going to talk without saying so. So, now, it’s controlled. Now, when we’re going to present to people who may be interested, we make them sign a CDA (Confidential Document Agreement) and the person must not talk for several years about what I told them. We are very careful […], but it has to be clear, there has to be a procedure to follow, which is what we have here, but does everyone have it? In any case, everything has to be formal and clear, even with Genopole companies. There is no question of doing anything that would upset our intellectual property […] and then, as an individual, I could be fired for passing on confidential information […]. We used to say, “we are going to have a meeting with lab X, where everyone is going to present their activities”, but we coded everything… It is not possible because I am presenting to people I do not know who are outside the company and they were coding too. Clearly, all presentations were coded and yet we are in the same sphere, but we are not the same company, so we have to be careful (Interview with Fabrice, researcher in an R&D laboratory accredited by the biocluster, January 2015).

Thus, we observe individual and collective strategies for retaining information, between laboratories and between companies, but even between research teams within the same institution, in order to obtain funding. In this context, interindividual relations at the cluster level can be constraining for researchers who compete or for those who take on increased administrative tasks. In addition, this context can exacerbate tensions related to position and status. Insecure staff, for example, may prefer to value their work rather than participate in collective laboratory moments (Gastaldi and Lanciano-Morandat 2017).

At a collective level, laboratories are also subject to various evaluations and indicators (HCERES, global university rankings, cluster accreditation, etc.). This competition promotes the idea that larger research laboratories are preferable (Vinck and Zarama 2007, p. 278). With sufficient critical mass, they would carry more weight with respect to Europe or the Ministry of Research, which fund them. We then observe the merger of laboratories, which modifies and shakes up the working practices of teams that were previously different, as this laboratory director anticipates:

In fact, because of budgetary questions from the Ministry of Research, the lab is at risk of being grouped with one or maybe two other labs. If that happens, it’s going to take up a crazy amount of my time and, above all, we won’t have any visibility on the reorganization that will follow: will we have the same type of funding? The same work? The same team? We have a lot of questions (Interview with Blandine, accredited laboratory director, October 2015).

We see in the words of this researcher the fear of seeing organizational logics change and the apprehension of the time that she will have to dedicate to this adaptation. Indeed, as Vinck observes in his ethnography of laboratory mergers, the resulting research collective is the result of a difficult construction of new operating rules, where managerial and scientific logics clash (Vinck and Zarama 2007). Moreover, scientific budgetary policies seem to prevent certain laboratories from using instruments or products that are commercialized on the market, due to a lack of resources. The cofounder of one biocluster start-up explained that, despite his partner’s previous research activity in one of the largest laboratories on the site, his company was unable to sell diagnostic kits that he considered useful for the laboratory’s activity:

Yet, we solved specific problems at this lab when [his partner] was there. I mean, gee, why don’t they buy our stuff? That’s so stupid! The reason is that they are so caught up in budget restrictions and lots of complicated things that, in the end, they don’t have time… (Interview with Michel, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, December 2014).

While the work of researchers increasingly requires the use of specific equipment or products in the course of their research (Joly 1997), they are also increasingly confronted by budget constraints. In addition, they are increasingly encouraged to work in collaboration with private actors.

5.2.3. Researchers and industrial collaboration: an unequal commitment

In addition to bibliometric indicators, positions in world rankings, holding accreditations, research quality and consequently the ability of laboratories to obtain funding also depend on their ability to work with other disciplines and to collaborate with industry. The intensification of publication work among researchers is increased according to the level of industrial application, notably patents. Indeed, following the work of Godin and Gingras (Godin and Gingras 2000), we know that the researchers who are most productive in publication activities are those who are also most involved in industrial partnerships; patenting is often preceded by intense publication activity (Azoulay et al. 2009), as this researcher explains:

There is no technology development without high-level publication, they go hand in hand. There are people involved in technological developments for extraordinary vectors that have been published in Nature. Behind this is international visibility, recognition, everyone wants this product. Obviously, they go hand in hand! It’s become essential that we become a key player on the international scene and that we publish high-level papers. We’re all heading in that direction because, if we have high-level articles, we’ll get grants and therefore money and that’s our primary goal […]. At my level, as a researcher, the goal is to publish at a high level, to patent, to bring in money, international recognition in meetings and so on… (Interview with Fabrice, researcher in an R&D laboratory accredited by the biocluster, January 2015).

In this interview extract, we see all the qualities of the star scientist identified by Caroline Lanciano-Morandat and Lise Gastaldi (Gastaldi and Lanciano-Morandat 2017): a large number of international publications, prestigious prizes, significant funding and so on. This researcher is in an R&D laboratory, so it is difficult to make him a textbook case, as researchers working in public laboratories are less subject to the patent issue. Nevertheless, his laboratory includes researchers from INSERM, the University of Evry and the CNRS. Socializing with the patent culture is certainly applicable to them too. Some authors see this publication–patent relationship as a system of cooperative exchange (Crespo and Dridi 2007) that allows researchers involved in industrial relations to access the resources necessary to maintain more fundamental activities. Others point instead to a destabilization of scientific work (Hubert and Louvel 2012, p. 20). The long time frames, supervised by peers, and the scientific requirements are constrained by the short time frame imposed by the industrial partner (Brunet 2012). Tenured researchers are therefore subject to a progressive acculturation of the research valorization model, through patents, which they then transmit to their PhD students. We can then observe sequencing strategies (Slaughter and Rhoades 2010) that are put in place, during the thesis, in order to reconcile publications with patents, as explained by this same R&D researcher:

Here, there’s a pretty big patent culture, so I tend to anticipate the patent very early on. For example, right now, I’ve applied internally for a patent. They assess whether it’s of interest. If it is, then it becomes the subject of a PhD thesis, but there may be a delay of a year before the data becomes protected, so that means that you can’t talk about it. So, it means the PhD student can’t go to meetings, can’t publish, etc. However, she will be in her last year of her thesis next year, so at that point, once the patent is filed, she can go to all the meetings and she can publish, but she’ll have been thinking about it early on (Interview with Fabrice, researcher in an R&D laboratory accredited by the biocluster, January 2015).

This “portrait of the PhD student as entrepreneur” (Frances 2012) is particularly characteristic of PhD students whose thesis subject is applied research and who are therefore socialized very early on to this sequencing between publications and patents. Nevertheless, those who pursue more fundamental research also feel drawn towards businesses, as this bioinformatics PhD student explains:

Well, that is to say that the most recognized research, and therefore the best funded, is the one that has the most industrial applications. I’m in basic research, which takes more time, so I publish less. If I don’t publish, I’m not recognized. And if I do publish, I’m not fully recognized either, because it doesn’t often come with a patent… I really regret it, but the job market in public research is so clogged up that I know the day will come when I’ll have to sell my soul to the devil and work at L’Oréal (laughs). For now, I’m enjoying being able to do research… quote unquote (Interview with Anastasia, PhD student in bioinformatics in a labelled laboratory, September 2015).

This interview extract is consistent with the observation that basic research still makes sense to some researchers (Joliot 2013). The discourse on the end of an ideological barrier between basic and applied research contrasts with this feeling, perceptible in the PhD student’s remarks, of the loss of legitimacy of basic research (Hubert and Louvel 2012, p. 24). Thus, we observe a heterogeneous relationship with industrial collaboration on the part of researchers. On the one hand, R&D laboratories participate in the construction of profiles that master the culture of both publication and patenting. On the other hand, basic research laboratories may host researchers who, conversely, have a scientific ethos in the Mertonian sense. This observation refers to the diversity of categories constructed by Lamy and Shinn (2006). Among researchers, the authors distinguish between three types of relationship to industrial logic: (1) the Academic, who attaches more importance to the scientific value of his work; (2) the Pioneer, on the contrary, who refers more to its industrial application. He does not give up on science, but he prefers to adapt it to economic imperatives. Finally, (3) the Janus, who can “signify his inclination for research without neglecting economic issues. Conversely, he can express his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship without adopting the same mercantile profile as the Pioneer” (ibid., p. 38). Moreover, the call for industrial collaboration produces individual integration behaviors to varying degrees, between industry with science, without the dissolution of science into industry being completely achieved. Let us take a look at the cluster’s business creators.

5.3.1. Individuals are increasingly encouraged to start a business to escape unemployment

For the past 15 years, the switch to business creation has been taking place at an increasingly early stage. Not only are researchers encouraged to set up their own company based on their research, but students who have not yet entered the job market are also being encouraged to become entrepreneurs. Higher education has become a training offer, where students must choose not only courses, but also a pathway with the minimum cost and the maximum profit, to meet the needs of the labor market (Granger 2015, p. 11). The responsibility then falls on students to become actors in their educational pathways (Brucy 2012). They therefore become responsible for their own successes or failures in accessing the labor market. In addition to this responsibility in the choice of training, students are encouraged to create their own businesses.

The dissemination of this entrepreneurial spirit through schools is based on a set of European recommendations developed within a project that brought together experts from several countries, called “Best procedure project on Entrepreneurship Education and Training”. These experts defined a series of desirable objectives for national education systems at all levels, from elementary school to higher education (Verzat 2015). This entrepreneurial directive can be observed in France as early as middle school (Tanguy 2016). Partnerships are set up between associations (the main one is “Entreprendre Pour Apprendre (Learn by Undertaking)”) and the National Education ministry, so that middle and high school students create their own mini-enterprises. This diffusion is reinforced at the time of higher education. Business, management and engineering schools have been pioneers in this transmission, where lessons are oriented towards these individual entrepreneurship logics (Lamy 2017).

Universities are also increasingly training and encouraging entrepreneurship. If we take the case of the University of Evry, recently attached to the Paris-Saclay university grouping, we observe a series of devices, events or workshops proposed with this objective. For example, on March 13, 2018, the Life Sciences department of the University of Paris-Saclay organized a day entitled “Sensibilisation à la création d’entreprises en sciences du vivant” (Raising awareness of business creation in life sciences) in partnership with Genopole. The round tables were entitled “De l’université vers l’entreprise: les ambitions de l’Université Paris-Saclay et Genopole” (From university to business: the ambitions of the University of Paris-Saclay and Genopole) and even “Témoignages de créateurs d’entreprise sur le plateau de Saclay et à Genopole” (Testimonies of business creators on the Saclay stage and at Genopole). The University of Evry has also appointed an Entrepreneurship Officer and a Corporate Relations Officer, whose roles are to facilitate the introduction of students with the problems faced by entrepreneurs through a number of initiatives: the Entrepreneurs Café, Entrepreneurship Day, Workshops for prototyping business challenges and so on. The University of Paris-Saclay is also involved in spreading the Californian success story by organizing student entrepreneur trips to the heart of Silicon Valley. Since 2014 and the creation of the student entrepreneur status, these types of initiatives have been steadily increasing. This status is aimed at students in the course of their studies or young graduates who submit their business project during an application to one of the 29 Student Clusters for Innovation, Transfer and Entrepreneurship (Pôles Etudiants Pour l’Innovation, le Transfert et l’Entreprenariat, PÉPITE). Once selected, students receive support from a teacher and an external advisor and have access to the various PÉPITE networks. Student entrepreneurs can enroll for the student-entrepreneur (Diplôme d’ Etudiant-Entrepreneur) diploma, which costs 500 euro per year, and can have their studies modified if their business project requires it. Genopole has been a pioneer in this area since 2005, 10 years before the creation of the student-entrepreneur status, when it hosted the IGEM competition:

Every year, teams of degree students from all fields of science and from a variety of backgrounds spend their summers developing and realizing a project that involves creating biological systems with, as yet, non-existent functions from microorganisms and cells into which “bio bricks” provided by MIT are assembled (Häfner 2010, p. 986).

This time, the reference is not Silicon Valley, but another cluster that is also dominant in literature: that of Boston, centered around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This team highlights two dominant directives faced by students aiming for a career in research: on the one hand, to professionalize in the development of projects with high technological potential during their studies and, on the other hand, to position themselves in globalized competition.

In general, business creation is seen as a way to address youth unemployment, which has been steadily increasing since the 1980s (Le Rudulier 2016; Toutain and Verzat 2017). Indeed, the “auto-entrepreneur” or student entrepreneur statuses are presented as a way to escape the constraints of big business (or academia) and to respond to liberal values of freedom, self-actualization and succeeding in private enterprise. In reality, behind these statuses, insecurity, that is, unemployed or young graduates without income (Abdelnour 2014), is mostly hidden, even though official speeches claim to reduce unemployment through these same devices.

With its Shaker program, the biocluster is fully involved in encouraging young graduates and students to create their own businesses. In addition to the classic accompaniment of researchers supported by Genopole business managers in the realization of business plans and fundraising, the cluster wishes to intervene as soon as possible with future entrepreneurs:

We are going to launch a Shaker project aimed at young people who want to create a business directly from the results of their science thesis. Knowing that they will no longer be going to INSERM or CNRS, these researchers are – thinking: “Why not make my thesis serve two purposes? On the one hand, a very important degree in science and, on the other hand, a start in life to develop a business project”. With this Shaker, we are going to develop a support and hosting arrangement for these very young researchers. It is interesting to see that this mobilization movement is developing in a somewhat paradoxical way, because the public sector is no longer able to offer positions in sufficient numbers (Interview with the general manager of the Biotech Finances biocluster, No. 754, January 30, 2017, p. 3).

Literature has identified two types of entrepreneurship: those motivated by “pull” factors, which refer to the challenge, the need for recognition, the availability of money, the desire for independence and so on, and those resulting from “push” factors, such as escaping from unemployment, coming back from a layoff or simply escaping a professional situation deemed unsatisfactory (Nakara and Fayolle 2012). The creation of start-ups is encouraged by institutions, such as the OECD and Genopole, in order to respond to a “push” factor, that being the high unemployment rate among young graduates. However, although students and young graduates are particularly encouraged to create their own businesses, they are far from being representative of the cluster’s entrepreneurs. Moreover, the logic outlined here, which is eminently individualistic, also seems difficult to reconcile with the claims of collaboration.

5.3.2. The fragility of the male 30-something entrepreneur

Management literature abounds on the dithyrambic description of entrepreneurs as a people outside the norm: they take risks, are autonomous, adapt quickly and know how to mobilize a network (Buquet et al. 2017, p. 97). They have all the characteristics of the heroic figure described by Schumpeter, who breaks the economic routine through a process of creative destruction (Schumpeter 1934). “Lifestyle” entrepreneurs (Gomez-Breysse 2016) are described as resistant to stress, which makes them high performers. Unlike executives, who would face a difficult reconciliation between personal and professional life, entrepreneurs are in harmony with their professional choices and view business creation as a self-accomplishment. This vision echoes the works that describe the figure of the artist as the archetype of the modern worker who is hyperflexible, autonomous, creative, capable of acting in uncertainty, who advocates freedom and who mocks the hierarchical and organizational constraints of the traditional enterprise (Chiapello 1998; Menger 2003). Chiapello sees a coming together of the logics of art and management, while Menger postulates that the characteristics of artists prefigure those that the world of work requires from now on of workers as a whole: “hyperindividualism, creativity, mobility, taste for risk and novelty, acceptance of forced vacations and of the most blatant inequalities” (Rameaux and Ribac 2003, p. 146).

This imaginary of the bold visionary was forged around a few personalities who put their whole being in the service of their company and/or brand. Through presentations (pitches) in front of full houses, they put forward the extraordinary potential of their project. One thinks of Steve Jobs’ highly publicized presentations to promote the latest technological products marketed by the Apple brand. Silicon Valley is particularly well known for the figure of the entrepreneurial “winner” who emerges in the context of a technology cluster: a young American man in his thirties or still a student, most often working in the electronics and information technology fields, with a technologically revolutionary project (Barthe et al. 2016). Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft and Marc Zuckerberg at Facebook are the best-known examples.

However, beyond speeches and representations, several studies show that the daily life of these entrepreneurs is not limited to this embellished vision of business creation. In the same way that the success stories of the Silicon Valley and MIT clusters are very much in the minority compared to the failures that mark the many initiatives that are taken there, the few successes of entrepreneurs are generally highlighted, whereas, more often than not, they experience failures, financial setbacks and abandonments that can turn into disasters. This is what Grossetti, Barthe and Chauvac show in a survey conducted between 2005 and 2014 on 97 innovation companies located in Toulouse, Castres, Tarbes, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Marseille, whose founders’ daily lives they dissect:

The entrepreneur is not a particular type of person, it is only a social figure constructed by references shared in varying degrees and devices that encourage, or even compel, those who wish to create businesses to conform to the expectations that are associated with this figure (Grossetti et al. 2016, p. 91).

By reconstructing their stories of business creation, they show that their paths differ from the famous figures of the start-up world. However, they share a common characteristic: 93% of them are men (ibid., p. 168). At Genopole, the observation is the same: in 2016, of the 75 company directors, only 14 were women (81% male directors). This large majority of men among entrepreneurs seem to be the only characteristic common to the aforementioned archetype of the 30-year-old student or young graduate. In fact, again in 2016, there were few 30-year-olds among business leaders. 62% of men who run a business are over 50, less than 2% were under 30 and 15% were between 30 and 40. As for women, the few who start their own businesses do so mostly after the age of 50.

The vast majority of these are experienced researchers, over 50 years old, who, after a career in public research, have developed a technology that can be converted into a business. A minority of young researchers have set up their companies from their thesis or post-PhD works; in 2016, there was just one. On the contrary, among the youngest founders, we find more engineers or business school graduates, who have most often set up their businesses with others.

Thus, whether it is based on a network of knowledge acquired over the course of a career, or whether it is set up by several people, the creation of a business turns out to be a collective activity, made up of ordinary innovations, far from the image of the young, solitary and heroic entrepreneur (Alter 2000). In this respect, the entrepreneurs all relied on the cluster or other public support to get started. The role of an intermediation structure like Genopole is to provide project leaders with skills outside their scientific training (fundraising, recruitment, network development, etc.):

After a career of about thirty years, I’d had enough of contract work, training students and then seeing them leave because we couldn’t recruit them… I was tempted to go into the private sector, I tried to get recruited in industry, but when you’re 55, it’s complicated, it didn’t work out, so I set up my own business while staying in my lab. The first year […] yes, the support from Genopole went well, at first, even very well, after moments of doubt: they didn’t believe in it at all, it was really impossible for me to succeed in setting up a company… I’m not someone much of a show-off, as it were, and so they didn’t see me succeeding, but then that changed. I had a business manager who was very present and helped me a lot with applying for public assistance and the departmental competitions. They also provided managerial support by taking on part of the cost of a business developer, which was very valuable at the beginning (Interview with Sylvie, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, June 2015).

This former INSERM researcher’s comments show that Genopole’s business managers did not see her as the ideal profile for a start-up founder: a woman researcher over 50. Resources were therefore concentrated on helping her develop the skills needed to create a business. Moreover, we observe that her desire to create a company, based on her research, is the result of professional dissatisfaction with public research, particularly the procedures and the lack of recruitment. In this regard, some observers see researcher entrepreneurship as a way out of their professional difficulties, rather than as a way of improving research (Heil 2010, p. 376). The study conducted among start-up founders comes to the same conclusion: the creation of an innovation enterprise is rarely the result of risk-taking, but more a solution in an unstable context (Barthe et al. 2016). Here, the survey highlights almost contradictory profiles among entrepreneurs. Indeed, there are rare cases that honor the figure of the researcher entrepreneur, at the intersection of science and industry, mastering both scientific and entrepreneurial skills. In the majority of cases, as we will see in more detail, they are “entrepreneurs of circumstance“ (ibid.), some of whom may even have difficulty in earning a salary.

5.3.3. Intense activity marked by the search for financing and competition

The definition of a start-up is similar to that of an innovation company, in terms of its sector of activity, its marketing methods or its mode of development, but it differs from it in that it grows rapidly, in terms of revenue and capital (Hurel 1999, p. 6). Some of the firms on the site are in this fast-growth configuration, in terms of sales and staff, but they remain a minority. Most of them have difficulty developing their activity. In this context, entrepreneurs rely on the cluster, or other public support, which may become essential to the survival of their business. Let us listen again to the former INSERM researcher, now a company director, who reports on her financial situation vis-à-vis her former research colleagues:

I don’t think they realize the financial difficulty that we find ourselves in, I don’t think they know… Me, when I explain to them that, every month, I have to find 1,000 euro of salary (laughs), it’s another world… (Interview with Sylvie, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, June 2015).

We recall that this director of a company of five people has, among her employees, a CIFRE PhD student who is doing her thesis with an accredited laboratory. She was referring to the divide that exists between a laboratory that welcomes a PhD student in order to develop its research policy and the necessary, even vital, commercialization of the results of the thesis for the survival of the business. This fear of failure can then cause damage. The founder of a start-up is very often identified with his company. Thus, keeping the company afloat or witnessing its failure can create a lot of anxiety. We recall that, between 1998 and 2016, 29 out of 180 accredited companies ceased trading, 9 underwent a buyout or a merger and 56 left the biocluster without knowing if they still existed. In this regard, let us listen to a company director on the consequences that a merger can have:

In 2005, our Japanese investors, inbetween raising funds, merged with a big pharma. But this big pharma was not interested in cell therapy products in the broad sense. So they didn’t insist in the board meeting and stopped our activity, even though the product was active… In the United States, it took a fortnight, in France it took three months. At that time, we had 60 people in the US and 40 in France. So, I found myself with a lot of debt […], I had to manage as I best I could. Apart from laying off all the staff, I had to negotiate procedures against research agreements […]. So, we ended up finding a buyer for the lease and the equipment, which allowed us to transform a desperate situation into a manageable one, a reasonably clean and neat closure (Interview with Alexandre, director of a company accredited by the biocluster, September 2015).

As we can see here, healthcare start-ups are highly susceptible to being bought out by a big pharma. In the interview extract above, we observe that the takeover can have disastrous consequences for the company: cessation of activity, laying off of staff, debt and so on. In this uncertain context, a recent study shows that entrepreneurs are highly prone to depression: 30% of them compared to 75% of the French population (Buquet et al. 2017). The involvement of these individuals can be limitless, while the payback is often small. As the company director above explains, she struggles to earn 1,000 euro in salary per month. Moreover, even though some manage to find a financial balance, highly active businesses with more than 10 employees are few and far between. Indeed, start-up founders and their employees are now known for their high level of involvement:

Each person is fully committed because they are fully convinced, which abolishes any need for hierarchy and makes the delimitation of working hours and the obligation to pay a salary secondary; the start-up brings together individuals driven by the same desire to give life and future to the project of the creative leader (ibid., p. 105).

The organization of work in a start-up context is therefore very intense for both the founders and the employees who work there. In addition, we recall that 73% of the biocluster’s industrial fabric is made up of start-ups with fewer than 10 employees. In this context, the division of labor is not as clear as in a traditional business; each person may have to perform several different tasks, leading to over-solicitation. In addition, there are cases where this multi-tasking can be carried out by one or two people. In fact, the survey counted about 10 companies where there were fewer than two employees. Their working conditions can be very lonely, as recounted by this biomechanics engineer, who works alone with her manager and who is often on the move looking for investment

I have to spend days where I don’t see anyone, I eat by myself, I go back to my office and in the evening I leave. Sometimes I say to myself, no one would see if I came in or not. And that? It was quite a shock. Afterwards, the director tried to be present at the start, but after a while, he’d often be in meetings. He’s also looking for investors, business plans, and so on, so he’s often away. I can’t wait for other people to come into the company so that I can really have professional relationships, even friendships (Interview with Rizlaine, accredited company biomechanics engineer, December 2014).

Moreover, the fields of activity of these start-ups and the projects they develop, however diverse, are all presented as ways to change the world. The employees within these companies are all the more involved as they are convinced to participate in solving issues related to genetic diseases, agriculture or even food:

To finance ourselves, we did friends and family, we are on the fourth time. We’ve raised a million euro in four rounds from private investors, but very private: friends and relatives. And we still can’t convince venture capitalists, because there is a very strong change, that is, there is a total financialization of the thing. At the start, we said, here we are, we have new tools to look at the world, and here is the evidence. There is some magnificent scientific literature. But, no, there is no interest, so we say, we will sell products, we work on a diagnosis […] for children we know how to treat but we don’t know how to diagnose. So we say, “our tool is really great!” (Interview with Michel, director of company accredited by the biocluster, December 2014).

This interview extract highlights just how convinced this entrepreneur is of the nobility of his project, even though it is not financed. It also shows how far the involvement can go: resorting to borrowing from family and friends. This commitment to changing the world, coupled with the small size of the Genopole companies, creates an intense workload with high hourly rates (evening and weekend work, little time for lunch breaks) and requires versatile workers.

Finally, the competitive context for start-ups in the midst of process development may force employees to maintain a certain confidentiality and provoke strategies of concealment, which may affect their sociability. We recall that, out of a sample of 25 accredited companies, only 5 have formal relationships with each other (see Chapter 6). In addition, 45% of the individuals who took the questionnaire stated that they were bound by confidentiality with regard to other cluster structures and 60% of them worked in a company. This confidentiality requirement is not specific to VSEs, but is also found among SMEs with between 30 and 40 employees. They represent 25% of the cluster’s industrial fabric and, within the Evry area, they do not exceed 60 people. Some of these SMEs are still in the research and development phase of a process to become market leaders. During the survey, the management of one SME expressed a strong reluctance to fill out the questionnaire for the network analysis. However, the questionnaire was administered in a one-on-one interview with the CFO, who then warned of “management’s fear that what was said in the questionnaire would be made public”. During this interview, it was explained that the company’s employees are subject to a confidentiality policy. Thus, each new employee is obliged to sign a document that commits him or her not to reveal any information. The document specifically states that they are not to talk about it in areas shared with other biocluster structures (intercompany restaurant, coffee machines, etc.). The CFO justified this caution by the fact that at the time of the interview, the company was in a publication phase around their technology in order to obtain European funding. Not revealing their research is a way to avoid cutting themselves off from future financial resources. Hence, in order to achieve realization of their process and be the first on the market, the CFO explained that the employees follow two rules, confidentiality and time optimization, which leave no room for external sociability. These two elements are the main factors that prevent individuals in the cluster from participating in networking (see Chapter 6).