Collaboration between sciences and firms for the construction of scientific questioning in the environmental field : analysis of scientific, social and structural innovations – CO-SCIENCES

Several studies analyzed the transfers of knowledge between research laboratories and firms. They identified in particular, the importance of the nearness and of the constitution of networks in the production of innovations, mostly technical. Public policies appropriated these analyzes by creating the conditions of this nearness and by insisting on (from the 1970s onwards), the creation of science parks ,and later, of poles of competitiveness, allowing to move closer, the world of research and the business world. On the other hand, in the United States (Gibbons et al.,1994) or in France (Callon et Al.,2001), various authors laid the foundations for a renewing of the relations between sciences and society, involving the society more in the production of knowledge, including the definition of scientific questionings. These discussions still continue today within various political and scientific cenacles and the governance of research continues to be modified in different contexts.

While researchers and firms meet daily within the framework of a bilateral exchange, or can be urged to exchange during debates, which are the controversial scientific questionings discussed and how to estimate the innovations, that are of course scientific but also structural and social ? These questionings impose at the same time, to identify or to conceive the devices of science –firms debates, but also to analyze how to get people involved.

Our project is double : on the one hand it is a question of conceiving and of experimenting a deliberative space consisting of scientists related with several disciplines and of business managers or their representatives, on the other hand, we shall analyze scientific questioning produced during these open debates, and within the framework of the couples firm-laboratory, in order to enrich the comparisons. The objective of the study will aim at the environmental questions because they concern the entire society, because they are complex and because they sustain the debates, (top-down or bottom-up). The study area is Western Brittany. The fact that it allows us to join a geographical nearness and the number of researchers concerned with environmental issues on the relatively restricted territory is consequent. Besides, an initiative of collaborative platforms science-companies was introduced in 2010.

The debating process of environmental questionings will be discussed and tried (task 1). In order to feed the comparisons, two configurations of the scientific-firms relations will be precisely observed and analyzed : the specifically conceived debates within the framework of this research (task 2) and experiences associating a firm and one or several research laboratories (task 3). The analysis of the innovations (task 4) will be led in a multidisciplinary and reflexive way, meaning that it will associate all the participants whether they be scientists or from the business world.

Through these various aspects which we suggest developing, the project concerns at the same time, fundamental research (acquisition of knowledge) and applied research, without the limitations of ideological and normative aspects.