The MyScienceWork scientific platform was launched in 2012 by Virginie Simon and Tristan Davaille with the aim of making scientific knowledge accessible to the largest possible public. A part of the open access movement, it now provides access to 70 million multidisciplinary scientific articles and 12 million patents. The main activity of this start-up, which has offices in Paris, Luxembourg and San Francisco, consists of the analysis of scientific data, which it undertakes both for educational and research institutions and for businesses.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced the concept of bricolage into the social sciences, noting that most useful innovations in pre-industrial cultures emerged from repetitive adjustments and transformations of familiar, readily available materials. In recent years, other academics have explored whether bricolage, loosely translated as tinkering, can explain how craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and other decision-makers operating in resource-constrained environments assemble creative solutions. Firms using bricolage exhibit three specific traits: a bias towards action that refuses to wait for resources to reach a desired level; a readiness to use whatever relationships, know-how and resources are on hand; and an inventive and even playful approach to recombining existing assets and resources in novel ways to advance the venture’s mission.

It was indeed a pleasant coincidence: Just the day before I visited Flex’s plant in Zhuhai on an invitation, I had read the new OECD report on The Future of Productivity:

what we will witness will be the emergence of start-ups having two or three co-founders from different parts of the world in the same way it works for science collaboration now. It will be an exciting development to come.