Technology Platforms in Life Sciences: what effects on research practices and forms of science-innovation coupling? Technology Platforms in Life Sciences: what effects on research practices and forms of science-innovation coupling: Final report ; Les plates-formes technologiques dans les sciences du vivant : quels effets sur les pratiques de recherche et les formes de couplage science-innovation ? Les plates-formes technologiques dans les sciences du vivant : quels effets sur les pratiques de recherche et les formes de couplage science-innovation ?: Rapport final

Open Access

Abstract

Collective management of scientific research equipment, commonly referred to as 'platform management', is both an object of science policy in life sciences, a specific management area for research organisations and laboratories and a place for experimentation and cooperation with research teams and equipment developers. As Keating and Cambrosio rightly point out, (2003) the technical and political dimensions are inextricably linked to the concept of platform. The interest of public authorities and genomics research players in platforms is in line with the history and sociology of science and economics, which play a key role in the question of instrumentation in the emergence of new systems for producing scientific knowledge and the conditions for increasing the economic and social returns of research. Mr Gaudillière (Gaudillière, 2000) stressed that the increased use of instrumentation in life sciences was part of a historical shift towards new instrumental logic, making very heavy use of equipment, automation and new information technologies to generate, store, analyse and represent vast amounts of data. Joerges and Shinn (2001) stress the role played by the development of instrumental research — through the creation of a lingua franca — in integrating increasingly specialised disciplinary fields. Several authors note the effects of a growing division of research work which requires specific skills (Hackett, 2004, Mangematin and Peerbaye, 2005, Arora and Gambardella, 1994) and the importance of the geographical location of such equipment, on the one hand, in order to exploit distributed and difficult to transportable research capacities, on the other, in order to generate dynamic innovation and cooperation between scientific teams. It should also be noted that genomics instrumentation is not consistent with traditional concepts inherited from physical sciences: these are less unique infrastructures built on strategically chosen sites than small instrument networks dispersed around certain local specialisation ...