The relationship between public research and companies : some rather mad success stories

As a subject for their third year dissertation, Ecole des mines engineering students Hélène Le Du and Jean-Baptiste Avrillier chose the relationship between public research and companies, and studied the ways in which it can be improved. They noticed that positive attempts towards improvement came up against numerous factors which opposed change. Rather than listing well-known methods to improve the situation which are never applied, they preferred to concentrate on several case studies which were rather surprising in terms of their success. These included the success of Génopole, a town centred on research and advanced technology created out of nothing in a new town in the Parisian suburbs, whose university was forbidden to teach biology. Another success was the Génoplante network, which managed to get private and public researchers to work closely together, and to take joint decisions on everything. Finally, they cite Philippe Kourilsky's gamble to revitalise the Institut Pasteur in the space of two years, a gamble which is well on the way to being won. Should one recommend a "a touch of madness" in order to break the deadlock ?