DOCTOR IN Start-up

Are you cut out for the start-up?

Working in a start-up after graduation is an increasingly popular route for doctorat candidats. Rather than the academic, corporate or consulting route, have you thought about working in a start-up or even inspiring or creating a start-up from your thesis work? Beyond your thesis results, have you thought about valorising your work by finding a concrete and useful outlet on the market? Do you also know that the deeptech start-up is a place where your skills as a researcher are highly appreciated and that your choices and actions have an immediate impact on the company?

This 2-day module aims to introduce you to the characteristics of a start-up and to ask you whether a career in a start-up is perhaps for you.

You don't need to be an entrepreneur, you just need to be curious and to want to understand the challenges of a start-up, which can be interesting even if you are destined for a career as an academic researcher.

All disciplines are concerned

You will particularly discover the framework of a deeptech start-up, i.e. based on an invention or technology developed in the laboratory and, consequently, less easily copied by the competition. Doctors of science naturally have their place, but so do doctors of management, law, economics and other social sciences and humanities, to complete the talents needed to develop the start-up.

Why is deeptech a big issue?

The government, through BPI France and its Generation Deeptech plan, and the European Commission through its European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) are convinced that deeptech entrepreneurship is an important key to European competitiveness, job creation, and the ecological and digital transition.

Bruno Sportisse, CEO of INRIA, recently explained that entrepreneurial culture is the best project management method to develop innovations from a laboratory to market applications and that it is necessary to better articulate public and private research with the creation of start-ups.

At the end of the course, participants will be able to :

Understand what a deeptech start-up is
Know the classic creation process of such a start-up (steps, pitfalls, good practices)
Be able to take a "go / no go" decision regarding a project of such a start-up
To be better able to collaborate with a Deeptech start-up while being a member of an academic laboratory
To feel more comfortable applying for a job with such a start-up, and to better understand how to work effectively in it

Understand what a company is in general: its challenges, its objectives, its typical difficulties
To perceive the similarities and differences between the profession of researcher and that of entrepreneur
Understand how it is possible to take pleasure in managing the complexity of a creation project in a way similar to the pleasure a researcher has in confronting an open and precise research situation
Know the structuring dimensions of a deeptech company, beyond the scientific aspect (including the Product-Market Fit, financing, strategy, POC or industrial partnerships)
See the logic of the company creation process, with the necessary double validation (techno-market)
Know the ecosystem that can help in this creation process (maturation actors, usual funders, SATT, incubators, BPI, links with laboratories)
Listen to the testimony of one or more PhD students who have created their start-up or collaborated with or within a start-up, and make links with the more theoretical elements seen in the training

Constant questioning by the trainer to co-construct the key elements with the group of participants
Masterful presentations on certain key points
Use of a flip chart or whiteboard to illustrate the key points with striking graphics
Use of examples of start-ups that the trainer has accompanied in their creation or development
Testimony from one or more ex-doctoral students who have set up their own start-up, or are working in a start-up

Self-assessment of knowledge and skills acquired on the spot via an online questionnaire, and on the fly (+6 months) via a telephone interview.

For the record

Duration: 2 days
Format: Face-to-face
Persons concerned: Doctorat candidats from all disciplines

Prerequisites :

To be a doctorat candidats and to try to overcome the usual preconceived ideas about start-ups
It is not necessary to have a start-up project to follow this course

The presenter: Éric Langrognet

Engineer from Ecole Centrale Paris, Research Master in Molecular Biophysics (Paris Jussieu)
Multi-entrepreneur (4 companies created)
Trainer in business creation at CentraleSupélec since 2002
Deeptech company creation trainer with the CNRS since 2010
Certified coach since 2005
Over 200 start-ups coached in the last 20 years

The pedagogical manager of the Deeptech Entrepreneurship course: Bernard Yannou

University Professor and Director of the Industrial Engineering Laboratory at CentraleSupélec (CS)
Deputy Director of Research at CS, in charge of Valorisation, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Head of the R&D and Innovation Management course in 3A at CS
Director of Economic Development and Entrepreneurship of the Engineering and Systems Sciences Department at the University of Paris-Saclay
Co-founder of a start-up
Supervised 34 theses, including 28 in an industrial context

For those who want to continue, your Graduate Schools will be invited to offer to continue this "Deeptech Entrepreneurship Course" with an Advanced Module: "Develop your Deeptech valorisation project" of 3 days where the doctoral student will have the opportunity to lay the foundations of an entrepreneurial project in his/her discipline based on his/her thesis work or a project/idea from his/her laboratory. This will be the opportunity to establish a first Valo Diagnosis and a Development Plan in the position of :

(a) Either as an inspirer of a business creation
(b) Or of a company creator

To register

Deeptech entrepreneurship course at the Université Paris-Saclay