A Day in the Life of... Pascal Iris

Managing director of Armines and chairman of Transvalor

Armines is a contract research association linked to France's leading engineering schools. Transvalor is a subsidiary that commercialises some of its work. Armines was created to improve links between industry and academia, but its hybrid status has made for uneasy relations with its public-sector partners and government master. So how does Iris make open innovation work in an organisation "that fills a gap", as he puts it, where he has to satisfy multiple partners, stakeholders and bosses, as well as the customers?

Armines was formed in 1967 by the School of Mining (l'Ecole des Mines de Paris) to offer contract research services, drawing on the skills present in a number of French engineering schools. The not-for-profit organisation partners with the Schools of Mining (Ecoles des Mines); the Polytechnic School (Ecole Polytechnique); the Civil Engineering School (Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées); the National Higher School of Advanced Techniques (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Technique Avancées) and the Naval School (Ecole Navale). It operates under the overall control of the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Employment.

The organisation offers research expertise in several sectors, including material sciences and engineering, earth and environment sciences, computer science, energy and environmental engineering, process engineering, industrial systems engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and the humanities and social sciences. It employs 550 people in 50 laboratories across the country, sharing facilities and working alongside students and academics in the various Schools. Contract income for 2006 was €37m, 46% of it from private-sector contracts, 33% from state agencies and public enterprises, and the rest from ministerial, regional and EU sources.

But it wasn't until 2006 that the hybrid status of Armines was finally recognised by the law.

Gaining acceptance

"I face the difficulty of managing a private structure within the public system in France," said Iris. "We were created because European public education and research is inflexible and not reactive enough, which is why Armines is very flexible and reactive and why we have autonomous management under state control.

"Institutional relationships with the public sphere are difficult: it is a non-negligible part of my job," he added. "But the French way is to find a way to overcome such issues. So an important part of my work has been developing the complete public acceptance of our organisation."

This has been a slow process.

"Even though we were founded by the state 40 years ago, it is sometimes still a question because we are a non-typical organisation," he added. "Being a private, non-profit organisation is special and demands that I am involved in deals to ensure there are no threats to our links with partners."

Iris has helped lobby to sort out this issue and in 2006 a law was passed to recognise the status of organisations such as Armines, which he says is the most important organisation of its type but not unique in France. Other engineering schools and universities have partnerships with similar private institutions.

"It took a lot of teaching, explaining and having very strong arguments, as well as benchmarking with foreign countries and a lot of perseverance. I spent a lot of time looking at organisations such as the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany and places such as Imperial College in the UK."

Managing upwards, sideways and down

As managing director of Armines, Iris has to keep a large group of stakeholders happy. He works for a voting board of 12 people, four from the government and eight others who are representatives of partner organisations or individuals with particular competencies. The organisation is ultimately under the control of a senior civil servant, who is not involved in management but can veto decisions if he feels they are not aligned with the government's current strategy.

Iris also has direct working relationships with the directors of research at each of the Schools with which Armines shares resources, people and ideas.

To keep financial control of this complex web of partnerships, the organisation has an overall accounting system as well as separate accounts controlling the resources it shares with partner Schools. Each lab also has a set of accounts, and has operational responsibility for ensuring its books balance. Iris says this helps distribute the initiative throughout the organisation.

All the key legal issues are managed centrally. There are only four people in Armines who can sign contracts with customers.

"The major part of our work is to help researchers get contracts, negotiate finances and legal structures and defend their interests," said Iris. "So we start with a proposition, and consult on the structure and pricing of the contract using in-house negotiators, and on intellectual property issues with our lawyers.

"Industry doesn't pay the full economic cost of its work with us, so we have clauses in our contracts and are able to keep some of the intellectual property (IP)," he added.

Intellectual property

IP rights are one of the most difficult issues to manage in any open innovation partnership. How does Iris approach the issue?

"IP issues are very difficult, because sometimes we want to keep the IP, even though industry has paid for the research," he said. "So we try to keep the IP and license its use to the customer for its business, applying open innovation concepts. This is very sensitive work and we must not to be too rough on this issue, because it can cancel a contract if industry doesn't understand the equilibrium we are trying to achieve.

"Contract negotiations are special. It's a real job to balance the pressure from the researchers and from industry. It is very clever to be able to strike the right balance. But we're trying to create an open innovation environment and the best way is to be very precise about what we want to do with the results."

Other aspects of Iris's job include explaining the philosophy of his organisation to the staff, and trying to improve the way it works every year. "But we're not ideologists, we're pragmatic."

Finding the right people

Another consequence of the way Armines is structured is that Iris is ultimately in charge of 550 people who work alongside civil servants in shared labs distributed around the country. Both are in an academic framework and this can make it difficult to sustain the right customer-oriented spirit among them.

"Both are courageous, motivated and very busy, because it is a hard job. The issue is that people don't lose the fighting spirit," he said, "so it's always a question of managing and encouraging people. I have to remind people that Pasteur worked to solve concrete problems, not just theoretical issues."

This difficulty is reinforced by the increasing emphasis in academia on publishing, peer perception and international rankings, which has become more acute since Shanghai Jiao Tong University started publishing its list of the world's top 500 universities.

"It is a challenge for us because we now have to say to people that they have to do both, publish and be active in partnership research," said Iris. "The classical state of mind in French universities is to focus on publishing. So we're not in a normal position. We are in a high potential position from which we can easily slip, so it is a day-to-day challenge."

Iris says that on the morning of our interview he had met a fuel cell researcher and told him how much he admired his work: the researcher was more concerned that doing the work had got in the way of his academic publishing schedule. Iris believes that it will take more than a few kind words from the boss to solve this problem: society needs to be more supportive of applied research as well.

"Everyone has a responsibility to tell researchers that they have social and economic responsibilities, because they are paid for by the public purse," said Iris. "This is the line that President Sarkozy has been promoting recently. Unfortunately, the system is controlled by people who generally don't naturally share those views; the new academic evaluation process being developed in France must urgently adapt the balance of its indicators.

"People are doing a difficult job that is not well recognised, so I have to help them to beproud and see what their real importance is."

Commercialisation

Iris has another role, as chairman of Transvalor, which develops and distributes simulation software packages for 2D and 3D bulk metal-forming processes based on code written at Armines.

"I see the full span from academic research, through partner research, industrialisation and then commercialisation of mature technologies as a product or service company," Iris said. "Many of our spin-out businesses are based on niches and it is a really difficult job to find and service those niches. So, with my team, we help to decide if a technology is ready to be spun out and how we might do it, and what structure we might create. I become a board member of a few of the spin-offs."

Developing open innovation means learning to work with partners of many kinds, working at many levels with a variety of agendas. Armines, with its hybrid public/private structure, academic and industrial partners, geographic distribution, and complex web of relationships, can be seen as a lab model of some future open innovation landscape. So what lessons has Iris learned that others might put to use in similar situations?

"I have to separate the essential from the inessential," he said. "My added value is that I have developed the ability to see exactly where the weak points in a situation are and to focus on them to help find a solution.

"It is also very important to be good at synthesising ideas. It's a business where you have many interfaces, many people and many aspects to deal with, so it is crucial to be able to highlight the major points - and always try to be human in your dealings with people."