Description: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the world's largest scientific experiment involving 3,000 scientists from 38 countries. Here a team of organization theorists collaborate with leading figures at CERN to understand how this project has been organized and what lessons can be learnt for the management of major projects and "big science".
Review Quotes: "This is a masterful piece of research that will make an enduring contribution to our knowledge of how the organization of science develops at the frontier of knowledge. Boisot and his many colleagues have crafted an excellent volume that convincingly explains why management theorists may have more to learn about scientific organization from physicists than vice versa."--Henry Chesbrough, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (OUP, 2006)
"This book has vast implications far beyond CERN, The Large Hadron Collider, and the Atlas project. Based on the concept of 'Information Space', 3000 scientists and others face the irreducible unknown. Standard planning and optimization fail. Emergence and generativity succeed. This book is a prolegomenon for governments and an emergent set of interwoven global civilizations."--Stuart Kauffman, MacArthur Fellow FRSC, Santa Fe Institute, University of Vermont, and author of At Home in the Universe, Investigations, and others"A brilliant book that unpacks the actual doing of Big Science, including the epistemological, human, and management dimensions of running perhaps the most complex scientific experiment ever done by mankind. These different perspectives are then neatly interwoven through the Boisot I-Space framework bringing insight and coherence to this global effort. Although I have followed the development of I-Space over the years, I have never fully understood its potential until I read through this book, not once but twice. This book breaks so much new ground it is a must read for academics, policy workers, and those responsible for running complex R&D efforts in a global economy."--John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp., and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge; and Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost, University of Southern California