On the Assembly of Things

An NYT article profiles the online research-contest start up Innocentive. The Article is a spin on “open source science” that confuses a lot of the issues but also raises interesting questions about both the nature of organization in contemporary science (both corporations and academic labs are too cloistered, according to this view) and is related the issues of “modularity”– namely the question of how to “decompose” a problem into doable chunks so that an open source-ish approach is worthwhile. As Karim Lakhani puts it:

The company, with offices in Waltham, Mass., has a staff of scientists who work with seekers and solvers, reviewing challenges to make sure they are clear and detailed, and guiding would-be solvers who may have a solution.

That specificity is crucial to InnoCentive’s operation, people who have studied the company say. “If you say, ‘find me a cure for cancer’ it may not work,” Dr. Lakhani said. But if problems can be “decomposed” into what he called modular questions, like “find me a biomarker for this condition, these questions may be more tractable.”

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