Headline, January28, 2014

''' THE BEAUTIFUL SYMMETRIC 

WORLD OF MASTER INNOVATORS '''

Many many  innovative firms appear, consciously or not,  have created and recreated, one way or the other, aspects of the Big Science Model.

Google and 3M encourages workers to spend some office hours tinkering with pet projects.

Infosys, an Indian IT company, gets people from different parts of the company to vet each other's idea. 

Valve, a big American maker of computer games, eschews hierarchy in favour of majority decision -making, including to select new staff.

What then can we all learn from Big Science? As a technical feat, ATLAS takes some beating. It's the world's biggest microscope, used by physicists at CERN, a large laboratory near Geneva, to probe the fundamental building blocks of matter.

It's barrel-shaped body, 45 meters long, 25 meters tall and weighing as much as the Eiffel tower, was assembled in a cavern 100 meters beneath the Swiss countryside from 10m parts, nearly twice as many as in a jumbo jet.

'''It generates more data each day than Twitter does'''.

It is also a remarkable organisational achievement. The components were designed by hundreds of scientists and engineers from dozen of institutions. 

They were subsequently sourced from 400-odd suppliers on four continents, at a cost of $435 million.

At any one time the experiment involves more than 3000 researchers from 175 institutes in 38 countries.

Does a multinational science project like ATLAS have much in common with a multinational business? Some management types assume it does. Occasionally they offer to advise the boffins how to run it better.

Alas, their advice is  'too abstract and difficult to understand'', scoffs one physicists. ATLAS, for one. seems to be doing just fine without it. Last year  -in case you missed the headlines -it nabbed the Higgs boson, known as the  ''God particle''.

It could be that Big Science has more to teach big business and even the rest of the world, than vice versa.

A recent Strategic Management Society Shindig at CERN and IMD business school at Lausanne drew a sell-out crowd of academics, business folk and consultants.

''Big Science'' projects differ from companies in important ways. They are publicly financed and do not seek profits. They are also one-off affairs, with no need to maintain supply chains or manage long term relationships with customers.

Yet, like companies, they must innovate furiously, make the most of limited resources and beat rivals to the breakthroughs.

Although no two bog experiments are exactly alike, all share important traits, says Philipp Turtscher of the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. 

There aims are often clear-cut-find the Higgs, sequence the genome or........

Potter around Mars  -but the means of attaining them are anything but. To shorten the odds of success, individual design decisions are put off for as long as possible. 

This says Markus Nordberg, who co-ordinates ATLAS's finances, lets the project ''absorb uncertainty''.

Companies, by contrast, typically try to reduce it by picking one solution that is known to work and sticking with it.

The honour post continues:

With respectful dedication to the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Through The Looking Glass '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless