Reducing Barriers in the Procurement of Big Science. Evidence from the Virgo Experiment

This research investigates the Big Science Centres (BSCs)-suppliers relationship in the procurement of Large Research Infrastructures (LRIs) and in the overcoming of barriers that may occur during the collaboration. We investigate the BSCs-industry relationship aiming to understand how BSCs and their suppliers develop new forms of collaboration to foster innovation. We conducted a qualitative analysis of Virgo, the research infrastructure that detected the gravitational waves. Our results contribute to the literature on the BSCs-industry relationship by showing, i) that organizational and cultural distance creates barriers in the relation and ii) identifying practice and closeness as mechanisms for coping with barriers, creating synergies that reward and outweigh suppliers’ effort with access to novel sources of knowledge and innovation. The resulting collaboration generates value out of big science projects for small companies that would be otherwise excluded from such large investments in science and knowledge creation.