Into the Unknown: What Big Science Can Teach Business About Collaboration, Complexity, and Innovation [Book Review]

M. Jelinek reviews "Collisions and Collaboration: The Organization of Learning in the ATLAS Experiment at the LHC" by M. Boisot, M. Nordberg, S. Yami, and B. Nicquevert (Oxford, U.K. and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 315 + xx pages, ISBN 9788-0-19-956792). The reviewer concludes that this book requires real effort in reading, in part because it is so replete with insights and connections. Yet its account is comprehensible even for those to whom high-energy physics is foreign, or those for whom information economics and organization are new concepts. The book's central theoretical framework, Boisot's I-Space, offers nonobvious insights into the complex spaces of science and organization that will readily apply to other complex commercial undertakings, no less than to larger policy discussions about funding research or the interface between scientific and commercial undertakings, and society's stake in either. Readers will emerge with thought-provoking insights and new tools for managing complex endeavors that richly reward their effort.