A visit to Harvard
Harvard in the fall is great. The place really has a unique feeling to it. Here it is.



I was recently visiting so that I could meet with some scientific collaborators there and to attend the teaching of the D-Wave case study at the business school.

Whenever I attend one of the case study analyses (the D-Wave case is part of the curriculum for MBAs at MIT-Sloan, HBS, Rotman, Michigan and a few other schools) I’m blown away by how quickly the students hone in on the real issues.

Coincidentally the focus of the discussion this time was how to architect “Big Science” projects properly, which was the subject of the SCE workshop keynote I posted yesterday.

One of the insights brought up during the class was that publicly funded “Big Science” projects have a very different participant selection algorithm than private efforts, and this may be the crux of why private big science works better. I am going to elaborate on this in a future post because I think it is counter intuitive but provides lessons for policy and management of big science.