CERN Accelerating science

CERN’s IdeaSquare is launching a new on-line journal called CERN IdeaSquare Journal of Experimental Innovation or CIJ. The new journal will provide an open platform and a data depository for socio-economic innovation research.

“At CERN we experiment with new ideas all the time, and IdeaSquare is a key part of that drive towards innovation,” says Charlotte Warakaulle, Director for International Relations at CERN. “Here, we bring together people from the worlds of scientific instruments-building and societal action to find practical solutions to challenges on the ground, in humanitarian work and in many other areas. It is at an innovative process with innovative outcomes,“ she adds.

IdeaSquare is a dedicated test facility at CERN that hosts detector R&D and challenge-driven student projects. It can also host special innovation-related events. The purpose of IdeaSquare is to bring together different actors of innovation to generate new ideas. In practice, people can use IdeaSquare to work on conceptual prototypes in an open environment, and contribute to CERN’s knowledge transfer activities by providing new socially and globally relevant product ideas and innovation.

Roberto Verganti, Professor of Leadership and Innovation at Politecnico di Milano continues that “CIJ will also give means to document the societal impact of the student projects at IdeaSquare and elsewhere”.

IdeaSquare is an experiment itself, and it explores new ways to demonstrate the value of basic research. Similarly, the CIJ is an experiment reporting and investigating cross-disciplinary experimental academic innovation research. “IdeaSquare and CIJ offer a new and unique platform to carry out and investigate student’s experimentation-driven innovation, inspired by the way CERN does frontier physics research” explain Markus Nordberg and Saku Mäkinen, Professor of Industrial Management at Tampere University of Technology/Director at Helsinki Institute of Physics/CERN and Editor in Chief of the New Journal.

“Without experimentation, no real innovation is possible,” says Saku Mäkinen. “The process of innovation is just as important as the products of this creative process. This is why we are excited to launch this new journal reporting results of contemporary research on the innovation experimentations.” An important task of CERN is to disseminate the results of its work, discoveries and achievements, and a medium to do this is through dissemination of its scientific and technical knowledge via publications in books, journals, and proceedings of conferences, in paper or electronic form. The CIJ aims to increase our understanding of how the innovation process happens, and what are the best conditions to efficiently accelerate innovation.  It also aims to investigate how innovation permeates into society and how new innovations are adopted, modified and even eventually discarded. In that sense, the CIJ is interested in the social dimensions of experimentation in innovation, as well as the innovation management aspect. “CIJ’s board brings together leading actors of innovation, including renowned experts in various fields related to innovation”, says CERN e-publishing expert Valeria Brancolini.

The CIJ will publish empirical and theoretical research on the practice of strategic technology and innovation management. It is a multi-disciplinary, open on-line journal, that focuses on in-situ innovation experimentation, strategic innovation management, knowledge transfer and management, and innovation policy issues.  

CERN has several activities dedicated to the promotion of knowledge transfer of CERN technologies and expertise. To do this it engages with leaders in academia, science, industry and actors of innovation. The activities are spread between the Knowledge Transfer Group, as well as IdeaSquare and the CERN OpenLab, three CERN entities that work in close collaboration.

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Call for papers for a CIJ Special Issue “Experimenting in Innovation”
Submission deadline: 31st December 2016

Special issue editors
Roberto Verganti, Politecnico di Milano
Fredrik Hacklin, ETH Zurich
Philipp Tuertscher, VU University Amsterdam
Saku Mäkinen, Tampere University of Technology

We are very pleased to announce a call for papers for the first special issue for the CERN Idea Square Journal of Experimental Innovation (CIJ).

For more information, read more here.