The French research system : which evolution and which borders ?

Abstract

We analyse the French Research System with the study of the contracts between the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the companies and test the hypothesis of small world in science. Our working material is the data base of the contracts of the units of the CNRS with economic partners, which has been collecting information since 1986 to 2006. This first application of Network methods and tools to the CNRS contracts allows us to obtain some results: at first, the major firms’s scientific network is not "scale-free" as if competition and strategy between the most large firms dominate the behaviour in R&D investments and management of contracts with public research units. However, in second part, we demonstrate that every discipline network is a "small world", i.e. , that it exists several scientific communities in which the diffusion of information is free and easy, even if its forwards through any actors (some labs or some firms). Probably, there are several "small worlds" in this database as in the scientific collaboration networks. Is seems that the industrial research does not disturb too much the properties of scientific network, as it’s well known in the literature of Sciences Studies.