Z’s CERN Report
I always love hearing what Krisztina “Z” Holly, the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation executive director, has to say about…well just about anything – from business innovation to one-handed space hang-gliding (which I’m sure she’s trying to arrange right now with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic people).
In her latest BusinessWeek article, she observes how cooperative innovation works at CERN. The Geneva based European Organization for Nuclear Research, depicted recently in Ron Howard’s film Angels & Demons, is focused on the really big questions of “life, the universe and everything.”
She observes that CERN is run as a big ‘collaboratorium’, where the culture makes it almost uncool to keep ideas to yourself. The notions of ownership and hierarchy are managed to promote sharing.
The big problems – like finding out whether ’42′ really is the existential answer Douglas Adams predicted – lend themselves to the kind of collaboration that we can only dream about in day-to-day business.
For now, finding ways for people to work closely and substantively with each other across company lines remains as challenging as recreating the conditions present at the beginning of the universe.
Oh, but then that’s what CERN plans to do this summer.
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