One way for companies to emulate Big Science is to employ more scientists. Simon Williams, co-founder of QuantumBlack, a London-based data consultancy, says his visits to CERN (to seek technical help with number-crunching) prompted him to value PhDs over MBAs. They can be a handful, Mr Williams concedes, but they also require less hand-holding. Give them an interesting problem and they will get cracking, he adds with enthusiasm.
Hiring eggheads rather than dunderheads is generally wise, though it can backfire: just ask the banks that employed “quants” by the dozen to create financial instruments that no one understood. As a rule, firms can attract megabrains only if the problems they want to solve are interesting. Basic science meets this criterion; people become scientists to extend the frontiers of knowledge. For many, it is an obsession. The only banter Schumpeter heard on a visit to the CERN canteen concerned physics. The television screens were all tuned to live feeds from experiments—on a Saturday morning. Few firms inspire such commitment; and no mission statement or desk massage will change that.
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