INRIA Labs
INRIA Centre at Université Côte d’Azur (previously: INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Méditerranée) is a research centre in the tech valley of Sophia Antipolis, in the South of France. It is the local unit of the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology and is partnered with the Université Côte d’Azur. This three-month consulting piece on organisational and knowledge management was devised as a placemaking project culminating from my four-year stint as an intern and PhD student in one of its research teams.
The project involved 100s of conversations and interviews with PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, who were seen as the primary stakeholders and beneficiaries of the work, as well as HR, heads and directors of project teams, and visiting scholars. It included a mapping workshop and a trial “shuffle” exercise where PhD students would swap research topics and teams for a day.
Taking inspiration from a variety of sources, from best work practices at top tier tech firms to interviews by fashion trendsetters, the main aim of this project was to help the leadership team understand how many of the challenges faced by PhD students and post-doc researchers on site came from poor access to information. My final report included a list of ideas for unlocking sociability, human connection, and informal collaborations that would enhance wellbeing as well as innovation. These would help this INRIA centre in Sophia Antipolis stand out as a place to start one’s career and thrive.
Location
Sophia Antipolis, France
Client
INRIA Centre at Université Côte d’Azur (previously: INRIA Sophia-Antipolis Méditerranée)
Services
Management consulting
Community engagement
Placemaking/ wayfinding
Area
5 ha
People count
500 staff
Template for an agile community
The jeunes chercheurs ( "young researchers" in French) refer collectively to graduate and post-doctoral researchers in France. Altogether there around 170 of them at INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, French and foreign nationals, all on paid scholarship programmes. They are short- to medium-term hires at the start of their career in academia. The transient nature of their stay comes with its set of challenges, namely in terms of the access to information relevant to work and place which can have repercussions on their wellbeing and career. The project investigated the mechanisms that could support individual jeunes chercheurs and the community as a whole, and create a self-sustaining learning culture that stayed true to place. These were organised around self-governance; knowledge types; space usage; values and brand.
Research at INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis is organised into 30-odd equipes-projets (“project teams” in French), which host the jeunes chercheurs. They vary significantly in size (the smallest consisting of 5 staff and the largest up to 30), with the budget to deliver a predefined research mission within an approved timeframe. The researchers in a group are united in purpose and this brings strong focus, with individuals rarely mingling with members of other teams during work hours.
The project teams are located in eight of 10 multi-storey buildings, organised along three asphalted paths, on a sloped site. The paths are exposed to full sun throughout most of the day, and there are few direct pedestrian routes connecting the buildings. These are barriers to exploration, strengthening the project team mentality that holds researchers close to their office location. In small teams, this can also contribute to individuals being isolated.
In keeping with the spirit of the place, we trialled approaches that would boost the sharing of knowledge and work practices informally, across teams. We looked at how the programme of events at INRIA could be padded up with small, regular happenings, replicating the format of private social gatherings often organised at the beach by young researchers living on the coast. We ran such events weekly during the course of the project and kept them short and timed during lunch hours so as not to clash with work. To keep interest up, they featured some organised activity. We ran loosely structured open chats with visiting professors, from France and abroad, invited for the monthly Jacques Morgenstern talks. These captured a wide range of ideas on the research process as a creative endeavour. A mapping exercise looked at how well young researchers were familiar with the site, and we plotted activities that could help build empathy between permanent and temporary staff and among young researchers from various teams.
In response to the mapping exercise, we looked at how elements from the architecture and the ecology of the site would help participants map the resources (such as expertise and knowledge, facilities), beyond their team fast, accurately and confidently in order to build a strong network across the whole precinct. Bringing ease in movement across the site through knowledge of the site would create opportunity for chance encounters (serendipity!), fitting right in with the spontaneous culture favoured at INRIA. Our strategy was to turn places throughout the site into a web of familiar touchpoints, which could also be recognised as informal meeting spots. We proposed a calendar of events for using common spaces such as the new auditorium more informally and playfully.
We also looked at the type of information that was already available at INRIA that the jeunes chercheurs found helpful and what they found lacking. We looked at best practices in knowledge management especially from large teams with multiple cohorts of young researchers, and looked at how learning and sharing took place successfully. We also investigated ways in which a “local knowledge continuum” across cohorts could be preserved in digital form and otherwise. We provided the structure for online content to be stored in blog form or in one of four wikis, depending on the currency of the information they would be holding.
The programme was delivered over the summer of 2011, with the help of PhD students representing a cross-section of the population of jeunes chercheurs on site namely in terms of the number of years into their PhD, their country of origin and fluency in French, and gender. This enabled us to set the project up in a way that would require minimal effort to maintain good momentum once the foundations of the community were laid down. Doing so also drove the need to identify the set of values that made sense for the Sophia-Antipolis site — those that would bring an enduring esprit-de-corps built on valuing the uniqueness of the place and the desire to contribute to it for the benefit of other, future jeunes chercheurs.
Additional information: This work was delivered in English and French.