History of science and bibliometric analysis suggest that the natural sciences, engineering and, to a lesser degree, medical fields, have been in a steady-state equilibrium for about thirty years. This article aims to identify one of the possible reasons of such a situation and to propose an efficient way to remedy it. The situation may be explained by the priority given since the early 1970s and especially since the mid-1990s, to social communication at the detriment of individual or collective cognition. An efficient way to remedy the situation would be, at least in some areas, to systematically develop collaborations in research between the academic world and the non-academic worlds. This argument comes in two steps. I will first point out the existence of two related dilemmas that emerge from the structure and the evolution of a complex socio-cognitive network of individual actors: the dilemma between the creativity of the global network and the individual proximities of the actors, and the dilemma for the latter to choose between communicating and cogitating at any stage of the network. The second step briefly sums up the evolution of the Western sciences and technologies towards a techno-science whose creativity seems to lose strength, then suggests that the generalisation of hybrid forums would give new vigour to today’s sluggish creativity.