The myth of the solitary founder has lived on. For the 4 million French independents, the future lies in cooperation: responding together to markets that no one can address alone.
In France, we celebrate the entrepreneur. Not the collective but the individual. The one who left everything, risked everything, built everything alone. Economic magazines devote their front pages to it and business schools make it a model. This figure of the solitary founder has become the standard of French entrepreneurial success. However, we no longer believe in it.
In 2022, we collaborated with the territorial management of France Travail in Vaucluse to help people far from employment in personal service professions. The program worked well: 87% of participants found an activity. Then we watched what happened next. These workers became independent, alone with their quotes, their reminders and their prospects. They had skills. What they lacked was not technical. It was a collective.
This observation led us to look beyond our own territory. France today has nearly 4 million self-employed workers, or around 15% of the active population. In five years, the number of freelancers has increased by 92%. A considerable economic force, but organized almost exclusively around solitary work. The difficulties that these actors cite most often confirm this: commercial prospecting, isolation, the impossibility of addressing markets that exceed their capacity alone… These are not only skills problems, but collective problems.
However, the dominant economic model has not changed. It always consists of owning more than your competitors, controlling your assets and growing through integration. But this model reaches its limits, including for large organizations. Faced with technological acceleration and the growing complexity of markets, no structure can claim to have all the necessary skills alone. Know-how is being dispersed, expertise is becoming more specialized and innovation is increasingly born from cooperation. McKinsey, an American strategy consulting firm, estimates that this ecosystem economy, where value is created between independent actors who cooperate rather than between entities which fight each other, could represent up to a third of global income by 2030. This is no longer a trend, it is the framework in which competition already takes place.
What this actually changes for an independent is simple to formulate. In a network, he can respond to calls for tenders that he could never have addressed alone, rely on complementary expertise and receive recommendations from peers rather than starting from scratch with each prospecting. Cooperation does not make autonomy disappear. She finally gives him the means to exercise fully.
Artificial intelligence is also accelerating this movement. For a freelancer, it now provides access to capabilities previously reserved for large structures: automating administration, preparing quotes, following up with customers… What used to take hours is reduced to a few minutes. But technology doesn’t solve everything. If it can optimize solitary work, it does not create the bond. It also does not generate trust and does not replace the dynamic of a collective that supports each other.
What is missing is not one more tool. It’s a change of narrative. As long as French economic culture continues to glorify those who succeed alone rather than those who build together, we will leave millions of independents to face challenges that they could overcome through a network. The question is therefore no longer whether entrepreneurs should learn to collaborate more. This is how quickly they will choose to do so. And if France will finally agree to celebrate something other than the lone wolf.
