The collective management of technological platforms is one of the key-issue of life sciences policy in France. Technological platforms have been given two missions by public policies: contributing to knowledge production and realize technological transfer to the industry. The historical and empirical analysis of six different platforms reveals heterogeneous operations and performances, including a rapid obsolescence of equipments for some of them. How to explain this empirical heterogeneity? Why performances and operations are far behind initial expectations? To answer these questions, we have assumed that research and innovation dynamics are due, not so much to the economic properties of research, to the goods exchanged on platforms or to public incentives, rather than to largely unknown organizational and governance mechanisms. Based on the characterization of three models of organization and governance of platforms, we stress two key factors for success: the development of engineering capabilities within platforms enabling to absorb rapidly changing technologies; the building of new multi-level governance rules to address the co-evolution of platform activities and research programs.