6.1.1. Consolidating knowledge

Consolidating current knowledge in a common approach aims to continue to:

• – understand, through modeling and observation through intensive simulation and experience (Kraft and Mosbach 2010);
• – design and build: specify based on the expressed need and adapt the specifications to the component and system (teleology and reverse problem);
• – control, optimize and manage the complexity related to mobility, large data volumes, networks based on digital science and technologies;
• – generate new applications based on robust knowledge.

6.1.2. Developing a sense of belonging, creativity and innovation

Foxes are interested in everything and move easily from one question to another. Hedgehogs are interested in only a few issues, which they consider fundamental and have been working on the same issues for years. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the small ones by foxes. To progress, science needs hedgehogs and foxes. (Dyson 2011).

France and its companies are facing a paradox. The promotion of modernity is everywhere, in books, conferences and managers’ instructions, which promise a management more respectful of individualities, creativity, initiative capacity and employee involvement. However, in the light of international studies, all the managerial innovations that go in this direction are far behind. All these elements form a system within the company and generate frustrations, retreats and a critical attitude towards elites and leaders. (Richer 2019)

It is also necessary to develop creativity and innovation, the interdisciplinary approaches mentioned at length, in order to develop beyond “compliant” thinking. Among the actions, we can mention:

• – the idea of idealization, which corresponds to a form of subjective attachment of researchers to their discipline, based on key values, a vision and a shared culture, must be reviewed, to take into account the new context. The aim is to encourage support for scientific projects by proposing an “ideal” that is articulated around a certain number of “beliefs” and principles of surpassing oneself:
  • - the feeling (true or false) of being the best,
  • - the need for quality and service that is superior to what “others” do,
  • - belief in the importance of their field of research,
  • - the conviction that progress is achieved through knowledge and know-how,
  • - sharing the proposed principles of evolution with the community (conferences, seminars);
• – it may be interesting to investigate this question (benchmarking in other integrative disciplines) to examine whether these identification processes are capable of creating an “entrepreneurial reflex” among members of PE researchers’ corps to increase their efficiency, originality and creativity, in short, their performance and their surpassing;
• – create an internal environment conducive to innovation for all PE units; reflection shared between the different laboratories, but also specific to each research unit. Set up a prospective reflection cell to serve as a decision-making aid mechanism, taking into account responsible and social aspects;
• – reflect on agnotology: scientific knowledge has emerged because humankind has realized that it does not know. According to Harari (2015), “the Scientific Revolution was not a revolution of knowledge but, above all, a revolution of ignorance”, in order to find answers to unanswered questions. Scientists quickly understood that even if the answers to their questions were not only partial, but temporary, they would still improve certain living conditions and eventually lead to impressive technological advances. While reliable knowledge attested by scientific research is available, Proctor (2011) wonders why “we don’t know that we don’t know” (see also Firestein 2012; Girel 2013a; Larrivée 2017). “Knowledge must therefore be accompanied by an equal forgetting of knowledge. Non-knowledge is not ignorance, but a difficult act of surpassing knowledge” (Bachelard 1957);
• – demonstrate by example the importance of cultural diversity by avoiding scientific illiteracy; promote creativity, divergent thinking and initiative among young permanent staff through initiation, training and formal (euro) and non-formal support; experiment in PE terms on high-risk subjects (for some open-ended examples: self-adaptation, self-organization, biomimicry, nano-bio-info-cognition integration, 4D printing, etc.); support curiosity about non-PE topics that could be useful to PE, do not hesitate to go beyond the scope of PE;
• – learn from failure (Mulliez 2017): in France, we do not (yet) have a Steve Jobs but we have engineering contractors who have probably suffered setbacks. “Let them be proud of them, take them on and make them known.” This will reduce the complexity of researchers, contractors, entrepreneurs and innovators who are held back by the fear of failure. This national consideration, a cultural revolution, should have consequences for education. In principle, science prefers experimentation because, after each unsuccessful experiment, it learns and can approach success (provided that risk-taking is funded);
• – acquire methodologies from other disciplines (chemistry, biology, nano-bio-technologies, artificial intelligence, etc.) to innovate in PE. Figure 6.3 from UM (2018) illustrates the exponential evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe, which will affect PE. Understand the potential of other skill areas for the development of PE.

NOTE.– With regard to AI in general, however, it should be taken into consideration that 62% of fundraising was recorded in the United States, 7% in the United Kingdom, 3% in Germany and France respectively, 4% in Israel, 3% in India, 3% in Canada and the remaining 15% in the rest of the world (UM 2018).

According to Forbes (2018), AI can be used to solve complex engineering problems encountered during the design, testing or approval of a new product. “By using knowledge management platforms to amplify and improve human decision-making, AI can use old data to understand problems that could not have been solved with traditional engineering”:

• – supporting creative projects based on interdisciplinarity (Godet 2001; Guérin, Bouquet and Morvant-Roux 2016) with funding from the GDR and its members (pre-projects + mobility + own industrial funds) to generate new products and processes (chemicals, products, materials, health, agri-food, energy). This form of shared requirements must be able to channel individual aspirations into the achievement of a collective objective, a “challenge”. So how can we support the risk of failure, of not being up to the task, in the desired competition?
• – demonstrating the importance of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly with regard to economic growth and employment in the current liberal model; help in this context to set up joint action structures with PE industrialists; reflecting (observation, imagination) on the possible assimilation by different users (from research to public) of the idea; promoting the acquisition of essential skills in professional and social contexts;
• – promoting interdisciplinary openness (recent developments reveal numerous, opportunistic and complex couplings between systems and devices, going well beyond disciplines, illustrating that our time is well placed under the banner of interdisciplinarity, convergence and the management of interdependencies);
• – supporting the development of a responsible approach to PE research.

6.2.1. A little reflection on PE research

A fundamentalist scientist behaves like a capitalist: everything happens as if his objective were to maximize his credibility capital. Indeed, what does a scientist do? First clue, he only talks about credits. In the morning, he talks about credit-credibility: is my hypothesis credible? How secure is my data? At lunchtime, he talks about credit-recognition: has anyone read me? Was I quoted in a good position? Is my poster well-placed? Am I first among the thanks? And in the evening, he talks about credit-money: did I win this call for tenders? Have I been given this new research position? These signs […] actually reflect part of the work and circulation of scientific capital. The basic operation of scientific capitalism is to convert one form of credit into another. (Latour 2001)

“You have a promising sector here, don’t hesitate to get involved, you will be actors in these great transformations […]. It is a sector of almost full employment, with wages above the national average.” This is what the President of Engineers and Scientists of France (IESF 2019) says. But the lessons remain essentially focused on needs related to the second industrial revolution (while the fourth is being explored), requiring imitation, incrementation, identical reproduction, etc. The oft-claimed creativity and disruption often claimed, are poorly supported, relegated to the rank of inefficient non-conformism.

In an academic research laboratory, do we think we live in a world of rational knowledge, with technical implications, in which we have interests in various ways: users, participants in innovation, designers, etc.? By being part of the technological advance, confident of our techno-scientific skills, we do not realize that we are beings subjected to a system that escapes us.

Our daily life may be in a world of knowledge, but these are essentially foreign to us: do we know how to repair the electronics of our car, how to intervene in the program of our washing machine or change a display element of our television set, let alone how to manufacture it? Even if, to a certain extent, we have been able to make a modest contribution to the optimized realization of materials, materials that constitute most artifacts, we do not have the necessary knowledge for the implementation of the devices that surround us. Just because they are easy to use does not mean we master them; in fact, they are the ones who make use of us. There is therefore submission to external knowledge that is delivered to us without our understanding and control.

However, in our scientific fields, with our formatted recognition, based on peers, clones or simply competing twins, we imagine that we have a lot of knowledge, certain free will, good inclusion in society (if only through various contractual supports). In this context, where the ambient paradigm is the law, we live in research as in “real” life, subject to many constraints, not perceived as such, as long as we remain in conformity.

True wisdom should involve revisiting accepted knowledge for effective maturation and to break out of principles of truth “delivered” or imposed by peers (ourselves) and the modes of education that shape individuals. Disruptive ways of thinking are a way out of the ambient self-replicating context; they avoid what the paradigmatic scientific framework has surreptitiously borrowed from religion. But is there a need for large quantities of black sheep in the publicly funded research system?

But as soon as a population of fundamentalist scholars becomes sufficient, exceeding a certain critical mass, there is a risk of neglecting, of putting aside the few impediments to thinking in circles with their small ideas, against the direction of the individual thought. Not only are we moving away from the forms of happy conquest of the era of the emergence of science, fighting against religious fundamentalism, but without yet killing the divergent (except in hiring), we risk behaving like those whom, for a time, scientists had kept away from power and the centers of debate of thought. This situation is not recent (remember Poincaré’s response to Einstein’s request to come to work at the Collège de France from Germany, for the reasons we know), but would tend, with New Public Management, to increase (risk of developing rationality to the most obvious irrationality).

But, at the same time, aspects of precariousness have emerged within the scientific community, linked to a continuous search for funding, which makes it difficult to ensure the sustainability of research projects. In the past, the North American system was more precarious than France’s: the functioning of French research units was ensured, on the one hand, by large (recurrent) internal budget allocations and, on the other hand, by external allocations. However, the decrease in the French research effort in academic laboratories encourages them to make more and more systematic use of external credits.

For Jacques Fossey (2004), “so-called recurring credits come at the beginning of the year. These credits are falling sharply, so laboratory managers are wondering every year how they will manage. Project financing arrives during the year, depending on the speed at which contracts are concluded. Needless to say, this breath of fresh air is eagerly awaited, although you can never be sure of getting it. Laboratory managers are increasingly dependent on sponsors, from whom they must systematically apply for funding. Such a policy undeniably encourages the development of precarious employment and we are indeed witnessing a multiplication of fixed-term contracts linked to these projects” (another form of precariousness).

Tenders in our fields require a significant investment of time and money: bibliography and writing are not enough; preliminary experiences are often necessary in order to provide first conclusive clues about the future success of the project. Without them, the project loses its persuasive power and can be considered too theoretical. Thus, the precariousness of research activity is becoming increasingly important and leads, for the most part, to the stationarity of methods: the researcher cannot serenely consider disruptive projects. He cannot know, in the long term, what he will be working on in the coming weeks and months: everything will depend on the success of proof of concept, the acceptance or rejection of proposals in calls for tenders and the evolution of his laboratory’s budget envelope. He is, in a way, condemned to reproduce what has already made him successful, hence forms of continuity in the innovative activity. Creativity and breakthroughs are therefore not too welcome at the door of funding agencies.

This situation, which is established on a permanent basis in France, with a research policy that can use the rapprochement between science and industry as an excuse for the budgetary stagnation of research units (2.1% of GDP against 3% in Germany), is anchored, as has already been reported, for longer within the American system. The current emergence of the project logic discourages some French researchers concerned, especially with success rates in the order of 10–15% (this phenomenon also exists in the United States, but to a lesser extent). The decline in the acceptance rate raises the problem of decision-making criteria and their transparency.

Moreover, fundamentally, the (risky) research activity is of a precarious nature because there is no guarantee that the hypotheses will run smoothly or that the research protocol will be successfully concluded, regardless of the researcher’s degree of competence. This real exploration of the unknown is today reflected in another precariousness, that of “finalization” (especially with the development of interdisciplinary projects): as soon as concrete results (preliminary experiments) are presented, in order to obtain grants in calls for tenders (ANR, H2020, tomorrow Horizon Europe, etc.), the real systemic consequences appear with the difficulty of a “good” evaluation including, in a responsible way, the existence of a risk of failure. So, researchers are indirectly led to work on low-risk projects, in the spirit of the times, more confident of succeeding in their conclusions. This situation is increasingly reflected in the introduction of too great an absence, that is prejudicial to academic research because of a lack of risk-taking for scientific exploration and the production of new knowledge and, in the other direction, by the precariousness of previously perennial statuses – that is to say, a way of justifying anything? An old question between the researcher who seeks and the researcher who finds!

So, to control this risk of submission to revealed transcendence, let us question ourselves (from the basic researcher to the funding structures). Maybe it’s worth being a responsible and a little undisciplined researcher? But only in conditions where it is not professional suicide (as long as the research is associated with a profession; but that is another debate). Throughout this chapter, different trends, objects of reflection, have been identified. They are summarized below:

• – scientific and technological exploration of the coupling of processes and chemistry, “classical” processes and materials to be satisfied, with an emerging community and strong external demand;
• – financing oriented towards incremental innovations with a high potential for useful concrete applications and economic spinoffs;
• – compliance with health, safety and environmental constraints;
• – emergence of an image deficit: for some hard sciences, the debate on the positioning of engineering sciences in the national system is not yet completely settled;
• – consideration of cultural and social aspects outside process engineering;
• – taking into account scientific and technological developments such as digital technologies: artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, in particular;
• – investing more in more frugal and environmentally friendly processes;
• – foresight and anticipation; exit from agreed follow-up;
• – the too inertial approach to research; the need to support more creativity, especially at the interfaces;
• – support for risky operations;
• – going beyond proof of concept;
• – low “stock” of intellectual capital available within the research community;
• – “free” financing bases too weak to allow breakthrough innovations in the academic world;
• – the need to develop the intelligence of complexity by teaching the epistemological foundations and fundamental concepts of complex thinking;
• – difficult emergence of radically new and disruptive ideas that are not totally stabilized and that compete with robust technologies with risk-taking that is difficult to grasp;
• – the company must adapt, even transform itself, in order for the new concept to develop optimally (problem of change management);
• – difficulty of interdisciplinary approaches and support for creativity (see also Volume 3);
• – approach new ways of thinking and acting in complexity;
• – difficult emergence of radically new and disruptive ideas that are not totally stabilized and that compete with robust technologies with risk-taking that is difficult to grasp;
• – change management problems, etc.

Some of these elements will be discussed in more detail in Volume 3. But if we do not wish to be nostalgic for a more successful distant past, to continue to play excellence in traditional niches, but only of interest to a small part of the population, we must change culture, starting with primary school, change organizational modes by encouraging risk-taking and valuing promising ideas for the future, by teaching leaders (technological, strategic, political) to practice interdisciplinarity. The existence and increasing role of what can be called “interdependence nodes” (variable groupings of interdependencies) raise the problem of the existence of “non-linear” causalities, as well as the problem of the methods by which these causalities can be understood and eventually used to prepare the decision. It is a question of taking into account the apparent indeterminism that dominates many of the relationships between social phenomena in order to move forward. Unfortunately, it is the human components in many decision-makers, which are difficult to quantify, that should be addressed. It is therefore by inducing principles of economic and social responsibility that it may be possible to overcome a certain current global technological stagnation (from which the genius of processes still escapes because of long temporalities, but for how long?)

In light of these comments, we should probably try to begin – through disruption and convergence – to optimize the genius of the processes in a different way around foundations that should be revisited. The mass taking of collective phenomena that transform rights, disinterest, fears of decline, unemployment, even rejection into something accepted, even desirable and driving, should be “formatted” into big ideas, for an integration of new “values” by synchronizing emotions and to bring out an exemplary dynamic, a partner spirit of a future to be built with others.

To move forward, it is not only financial constraints and orthodoxy that force a rather deterministic movement (despite the prevailing discourse). It is necessary to want to appropriate the questions for a maturation, in order to organize a collective imagination, with a certain promise of pleasure, associated with the robust search for solutions. In the massification of uncertainty, it is up to proactive schools (and research units?) to prove their present and especially future desirability and excellence by leaving statutory conventions behind. Posts are good, but what for, if not like yesterday? We must be ambitious and daring.

The difficulty is not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping the old… (Keynes 1931)