Entrepreneurs de circonstance : une enquête sociologique sur les fondateurs de start-up en France

Who are the founders of ?innovative? companies? How do they engage in entrepreneurship. The article tries to answer these questions on the basis of a survey conducted between 2005 and 2014 on 97 ?innovative? companies located in various cities in the Midi-Pyrénées (Toulouse, Castres, Tarbes) and in Bordeaux, Grenoble and Marseille. We propose a typology of situations of commitment to entrepreneurship. We show that these entrepreneurs, who most often create their business together with other colleagues, are mostly engineers and mid-career executives facing professional uncertainty (dismissal, risk of losing their job, difficulties in their work) but also occasionally public researchers wishing to create activities from their results without leaving their jobs. The foundation of a business, even ?innovative?, therefore is rarely the result of a visionary risk-taking of a person in a stable situation and considerably more frequently a solution among others for someone who is in unstable situation, and sometimes back to the wall.