3.1. Introduction

The aim here is to examine a collaborative business model from the public laboratory culture with a flexible entrepreneurial approach. How is this model interesting to companies? What are, or will be, the HR challenges in the management of employee apprentices in the context of the company’s rise to power?

3.2. An apprentice entrepreneur

We look at the experience of a start-up, created five years ago by a teacher-researcher and university professor, who has achieved excellence in her field by promoting 30 years of fundamental (INSERM laboratory) and applied research (former top-level sportswoman and qualified coach).

The company is created and managed by an apprentice entrepreneur from the public service. It is imbued with the notion of continuous learning that mixes different cultures¹. This particularity of the profession and the profile of the researcher gives the creator of this company a profile that we will develop below. Its approach is to consider that every apprentice is a fully fledged collaborator, since laboratories work with doctoral students, and all apprentices, whoever they are, have “atypical” relationships with motivation². The head of this company defines her approach as normal. It is characterized by a strong need for autonomy and recognition in the face of the anxiogenic activity that is creation. Our company manager, strengthened by her background, considers that every apprentice faces a blank page as they build and create their future expertise, which is anxiety-provoking for everyone. An apprentice is a researcher of their future competence, and their hierarchy will give them the tools of this continuous self-discovery.

This, in the culture of a teacher-researcher accustomed to the anguish of adults under 30, which is a very complicated part of life, creates anxiety. However, an apprenticeship must be calming and stimulating. For companies, it would be beneficial to have teacher-researchers in their teams whose approach would make it possible to disseminate this culture of innovation at the heart of apprenticeships and business management methods.

3.3. A new product in a present but immature market

The reference company is a service company that sells science and technology in the field of animal and human bioenergy.

Its expertise allows:

• – a private individual in B to C to know and characterize the physiological and energetic profile of a person and an animal during exercise in order to answer the questions:
  • - what can the person stand in terms of physical effort?
  • - how can it progress?
  • - what is its margin for progress?
  • - what is the benefit, in terms of health, well-being and performance, to their expectations?
• – a company in B to B:
  • - in HR/management: to offer a scientific coaching service that allows employees to feel good about themselves in two 30-minute sessions per week, to be part of a dynamic of success in the short, medium and long term, if they so wish;
  • - each employee: to get to know and trust each other better and consequently to be an ambassador for such a dynamic. Their behavior evolves because they will master the new technologies of connected health objects by using them only as “biofeedback” attesting to the reliability of their sensations of the difficulty of an exercise to better manage their efforts. Beyond the notion of quantitative performance, this makes it possible to introduce the notion of quality of effort and to let go in order to be able to accomplish such a distance, such an ascent and such a program;
  • - the manufacturer of connected health objects and sports equipment: to approach his approach differently based on the energy and motivational data of the customer and not on the technique of the object. There is no point in raising the level of technical sophistication of an object or making a bicycle so demanding (titanium carbon) that it loses sight of its user who would feel, in their daily management of the program, intellectually and/or physically outdated;
  • - insurance companies and banks: to submit to them the proposal for a bonus on life insurance for their clients who subscribe to this type of program.

3.4. As a result, an innovative approach

This approach is innovative in its philosophy. The manager is part of the company’s product and services that sell knowledge of the physiological characteristics of people when they exercise, to improve their comfort and autonomy (e.g. in the context of multimodal mobility, which must be chosen and not endured because of a physical disability induced by a sedentary lifestyle). With her team, she then implemented these values of well-being in the company which must be at the forefront of innovation knowing that the market is present, but that free online coaching and the culture of manufacturers (object-centered engineers) of sports equipment are still an obstacle that requires pedagogy, awareness and training in the notion of power and human energy autonomy.

Through this sharing of experience, a potential French-style business model emerged with:

• – the idea of enhancement to redistribute to as many people as possible;
• – reinvestment in the production tool and, in particular, in the sustainability of jobs promoting motivation and cooperation. The objective is to allow, beyond the permanent contracts resulting from apprenticeships, the possibility to take risks by innovating and questioning oneself and thus generating requests for continuing training, including in areas that are not initially reinvested in current production. Through these innovations, the aim is to highlight future training that we identify as being to be created, in response to these innovation needs. For example, connected health objects evolve so much in the complexity and completeness of physiological data such as respiratory rate, that it is necessary to train people at the interface of electronic developers and physicians;
• – a BTS apprenticeship contract (animal production for the monitoring of horses and sports dogs);
• – Master 2 apprentices in language and cinema (for the YouTube channel allowing the act of pedagogy for B to B and B to C clients, with subtitling for the international market to come since the head of the company is a world-renowned researcher with more than 150 international publications and supervised theses all over the world);
• – Master 1 and 2 apprentices in exercise physiology;
• – Master 2 apprentices in sports engineering;
• – apprentice doctors (PhD) CIFRE in the field of mathematics and computer science;
• – apprentice doctors (PhD) CIFRE in the field of sports physiology.

The ages range from 20 to 30 years old and the management is composed of one of the most senior PhD students who already has 10% of the company. This is set up to encourage him, despite a non-competitive salary on the market when he is an in-demand coder (Amazon, Google), given that he already comes from an engineering school and has already worked in the world of industry and even created his company before deciding to undertake a doctoral thesis in the CIFRE apprenticeship.

This person must manage the other apprentices, alongside the company manager who still wants to have time for her own teaching and research and who is faced with the problem of serving a university currently unsuited to the ambitions of researchers and teachers due to the lack of master’s and doctoral grants. The university therefore ignores the business world with a form of disregard for CIFRE contracts. The leader has taken the side of pragmatism and the breaking of the gap between the public and private sectors to generate a turnover which is the budget of this laboratory hosting paid students, as the public service did before in the “Glorious Thirties”. After 30 years of this model, she decided, at the age of 55, to consider another model that could be that of a future decompartmentalization. This generates aberrations between closing a research laboratory and a possible conflict of interest caused by the university on a management position to want to rebound outside the university, even though the university does not ensure this future.

It is therefore necessary and urgent to consider a mixed model by instilling a teacher-researcher culture to help the management of apprentice researchers in companies, as well as to be able to advise this type of neo-entrepreneur apprentice.

As a reminder, a company is a living system that renews itself and develops through what it learns day after day. A learning organization is built on a shared vision of its role and social purpose. As a reminder, in the 1990s, Peter Senge (1990), Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, defined five skills that any organization needs to become a learner: personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning and systems-based thinking.

There is no doubt that the above-mentioned example points in the direction of a learning organization because, unlike more traditional companies, the signals sent by the leader do indeed relate to transformation and innovation, her behavior being a model of what is expected from each of the stakeholders, students and employees. In a research environment, with young former top-level athletes in its midst, there is no doubt that mental models and systems thinking are also on the agenda.

3.5. Conclusion

However, as this “laboratory” is developed, we see that many other questions remain. We will examine them in the light of the future evolution of the innovative organization that we use as an example. However, it seemed interesting to us, given the model, to share a few points at this stage with the reader:

• – how to reconcile the learning phase of the profession (here a sports physiologist) with the permanent one and sometimes with an urgent need to communicate with the client and define the product that will allow them to be remunerated;
• – how to manage one’s own anxieties as a researcher requiring isolation (when writing a book or an article) and managing blank page syndrome, while reassuring the apprentice who is finally experiencing the same thing with, in addition, the problems of apprentices who may be in a field other than that of the researcher (computer science or mathematics for a physiologist);
• – how to manage the need to use experts, or even co-supervisors, who do not share the same management views.

The path of permanent innovation in cutting-edge fields with young researchers is an exciting and complex challenge, and sharing, including ongoing questions, is an essential part of it.