I am delighted to announce the creation of a corporate hotel on the Luminy campus – the Ben-Ari Institute for Innovation (IBEN) – which will be built by Eiffage with Rudy Ricciotti as architect and Tivoli Capital as the main financier. With 6,600 square metres of laboratories, offices and common areas, it will be a true ecosystem of innovation and collaboration driven by a vision that combines scientific and entrepreneurial innovation. IBEN comes at a particularly opportune moment, with young scientists needing to find opportunities outside academia, which offers fewer and fewer possibilities. As a teacher at the doctoral school, I understand that young doctoral students do not see their future as our generation did, in academic careers with few positions in large organisations and increasingly difficult to obtain research funding.
Here’s a true anecdote… When my entire team and I moved from Paris to Marseille to build INMED, which I founded and directed, I had to go before the Regional Scientific Council, and the president of the council said to me straight out, ‘Yezekiel, your project is pharaonic.’ To which I replied without hesitation, ‘That’s normal, I was born in Egypt.’ In the end, things worked out. After founding a superb neuroscience institute—one of the most beautiful in terms of architecture, designed by a great Norwegian architect—I am now going to found an institute for entrepreneurial innovation, with another great French architect, thus creating continuity on the Luminy campus (Marseille). I hope this will help attract researchers and innovation teams and increase the region’s appeal.
