Big Science initiatives like the ATLAS experiment at CERN exemplify the scale and complexity of modern collaborative research. With thousands of scientists and institutions from over 40 countries, ATLAS represents a global effort to uncover fundamental aspects of particle physics. In this work, we investigate the evolving collaboration patterns within ATLAS by constructing and analysing bipartite networks of authors and countries linked to their publications. Through this dual perspective, we uncover structural features such as modularity at the author level, and a clear nested pattern at the country level, each reflecting distinct organizational dynamics: modularity highlights the formation of cohesive working groups, driven by bottom-up interactions and stabilized by institutional continuity. Nestedness, on the other hand, underscores the stratified contributions of nations based on resources and expertise, revealing both strengths and vulnerabilities in the collaboration. Using percolation analysis, we assess the robustness of these patterns to perturbations, finding that modularity ensures resilience to individual turnover, while nestedness reveals fragility to the loss of some key contributors. These findings shed light on the interplay between structural organization and dynamical stability in large-scale collaborations, offering insights for managing and optimizing similar scientific endeavours.

Una McCormack and Markus Nordberg, co-organizers of Science Fiction and the Future of Detection and Imaging, a series of workshops exploring the role of technology in future societies, share what they learned from these events.

The potential of big science research infrastructures to make contributions far beyond their scientific purview has long been acknowledged. However, less consensus exists about the specific mechanisms with which such value can realised. This paper describes the ATTRACT project. A novel approach funded with €20 million by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme, ATTRACT represents a consortium of leading European scientific centres, academic institutions, and industry associations formed to harness their world-class scientific instrumentation technologies towards entrepreneurship within European economies. ATTRACT will award 170 projects centred on breakthrough imaging and detection technologies €100,000 each to develop a proof-of-concept within one year. With the goal of scaling a select few of the most promising projects, ATTRACT will facilitate additional iterations of public and private funding along with relevant commercial and legal support to bridge the gap between supply-push and demand-pull innovation policy instruments. The paper describes the ATTRACT project: its motivation, philosophy, design, and results to date.

Given its institutional setting and its history, the ATLAS Collaboration is inevitably a multidimensional project. In addition to fulfilling clearly defined scientific goals, one of its other related aims is to preserve and promote the open and international character of its scientific ethos. This could be described as a political aim. The birth in the 17th century of scientific institutions such as the Royal Society in England and the Académie des Sciences in France was also in part motivated by a need to allow Europe's emerging scientific culture to cross national, religious, and political boundaries. CERN, and with it ATLAS, are thus defending well-established and core scientific values. How might living up to these values show up in the way that the work of building the detector is allocated to the 174 institutes drawn from different countries participating in the collaboration? This chapter explores the issue by focusing on the participation of one country: Russia.

This chapter attempts to place ATLAS in its wider societal setting. Knowledge-for-its-own-sake may be what scientists aspire to maximize, yet knowledge-for-benefits is the constraint that they are required to work under if they are to continue to get funding. Given the rapid growth of investments in science, and the scale of individual projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, it is not enough to show that they satisfy the constraint. They now also have to show that they satisfy it better than competing alternatives. At the energies that the collider will generate, most physicists are expecting to see new particles appear, and these should give theorists enough to chew on for some years to come. But the non-physicist will ask, what are the options created by ATLAS and its associated experiments at the LHC actually worth? What new territory do they open up for the rest of us?

This paper describes a practical model and procedure on how to tender products based on new, emerging technologies. This situation prevails in large-scale scientific projects and in other, mostly publicly funded, efforts to construct systems of significant technological scale. The paper proposes a double-blind communication and tendering procedure for establishing the means, partners and economic framework for the projects that finally commit to accomplish the task. This procedure sets a dedicated technological broker in to central position of the information exchange between the buyer and supplier. The presented procedure reduces any political interference, ensures more accurate cost estimates and helps the project to obtain better financial basis to kick-off. When in operation, the procedure can be used for determining the costs and most prominent technological trajectories for a proposed solution. The approach presented paves the ground towards the emergence of virtual markets for products yet-to-be-engineered.

We live and work in an era when seemingly every waking minute brings an invitation to visit yet another site on the World Wide Web. Inundated with calls to check out www.whatever.com, we can easily lose sight of the fact that the birth of the Web is part of our very recent history. And notwithstanding the proliferation of personal and corporate vanity pages on the Web, this world of hyperlinks and hot spots has brought about dramatic changes in the means by which many individuals and organizations communicate, work, and trade. For new‐products professionals interested in the processes that give rise to radical innovations, what lessons can be learned from the development of the World Wide Web?To gain insight into the process that resulted in the development of the first Web browser and Web server software, Ari‐Pekka Hameri and Markus Nordberg examined project proposals, e‐mail exchanges, and other documentation, and they interviewed key personnel who were involved in the process. From this research, they were able to document the process and the environmental constraints that shaped the development and diffusion of the tools and technologies that form the foundation of the World Wide Web.Although a staggeringly diverse range of Web‐related services and applications have surfaced during the past few years, the original Web tools and technologies were targeted for a relatively small, focused community of researchers. Specifically, the origins of the World Wide Web are found in efforts aimed at meeting the information‐sharing needs of researchers in the realm of high‐energy physics. This far‐flung group required a global network that could facilitate the interchange of documents stored in diverse formats on a wide variety of computing platforms.Meeting those needs required neither excessive R&D investments nor radically new core technologies. Instead, the solution involved the integration of existing technologies—networking tools and protocols, document formats, and desktop applications and development tools—by an innovator who had both the necessary vision and firsthand knowledge of the practical benefits that were needed. From a management perspective, perhaps the key lesson learned involves giving R&D personnel both the freedom and the support to initiate new projects and studies.

The epistemic (knowledge creation) benefits of big science centres are obvious to everyone. During an era of tight budgetary constraints, however, it is difficult to justify the existence of these centres on the basis of their epistemic contributions alone. Although it is recognized that the contributions are not limited to epistemic types only, the picture of other types of contribution (e.g., spin-off benefits) remains blurred. The present paper proposes a framework for depicting and discussing the various contributions of big science centres in a systematic manner.