Systemic approach as a multi-criteria design method: healthcare R&D centre application

In today's very competitive and changing environment, developing a competitive advantage is a huge challenge for companies. But it is not their single challenge. They have to be different from and always better than the others on a lot of criteria. Companies' performance has become multi-criteria; the performance can be for example scientific, societal, ethical or economical performance. In this context, companies that plan to create a new organisation or department have to think ahead all these strategic objectives to fulfil. This article presents a systemic approach for the multi-criteria design of a research centre, MIRCen (Molecular Imaging Research Centre). MIRCen is a research centre developed by the CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) on preclinical imaging dedicated to gene, cell and drug therapies. Its main objective is to facilitate and accelerate new drug and new therapies creation and development thanks to the gathering on a single geographical site of technological skills, medical skills and industrial network. The general objective of this research is to design, anticipate and improve the management of such a pole of competence, especially in terms of costs and creation of values (such as scientific, environmental, social or ethical values). Our systemic approach, called SCOS'D (Systemics for Complex Organisational Systems' Design), is used to design this new organisational system to meet in the best possible way the expectations of all stakeholders. This paper presents the different possible perspectives of the proposed method too, for example performance measurement and control, quality management or costs/values balance, through the tool SCOS'C² (Systemics for Complex Organisational Systems' Command and Control).