Investigating the Societal Impact of Large Research Infrastructure: A Study on the Compact Linear Collider at CERN

Research is less and less assessed on scientific impact alone. Governments invest public funds into scientific research with the expectation that economic, medical and other benefits would ensue as the increasingly important contributions of science to society. Research came to be seen as a valuable enterprise itself, given the value of the knowledge generated, even if its application is not immediate. Diverse Big Science centres issue annual impact reports highlighting the positive impacts from the science on society, industry, and technological progress, human excellence, and education. Number of publications, licensing, start-ups, bilateral cooperation agreements, sustainable development goals, related events are used as indicators to measure the impact of a research. Beside an increased number of literatures on the socio-economic impact assessment, many important meetings and workshops includes an obligatory discussion on the impact. Thus, the European particle physics community repeatedly raised the question on the societal impact during conversations. The community meets to define a strategy for the future developments in fundamental research on physics by evaluating ongoing studies. Thereby in an open symposium in Granada in May 2019, the committee highlighted a pure academic significance of an international collider study and its unclear technical and economic ripple effects for general public. Likewise, the European Strategy update in June 2020 again recommended to emphasise the scientific impact of particle physics, as well as its technological, societal and human capital outcomes. Additionally, the committee underlined an importance of partnership with industry and other research institutes, as these collaborations are key for sustaining scientific and technological progress, helping to drive innovation, and bringing societal benefits. Despite the raised interest to the topic, there is still no common methodology or tool yet for evaluation of Big Science impacts. The assessment of the costs and benefits of research, development and innovation infrastructures stays extremely difficult and is still discussed as quite subjective and intuitive approach. Causal factors leading to impact remain speculative which creates much uncertainty for effective measures of impact areas. Thus, this study seeks to obtain data which will help to address the indicated research gaps. There are two primary aims of this dissertation: to identify impact fields and its measures and to explain the relationship between them. The research is built on the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) study as a large-scale international project at its early development phase. The project still has the ‘study’ status since CLIC has not been approved for the construction. The initial data on the CLIC study was collected from the CERN procurement database and presented about 13000 procurement orders, 130 collaboration contracts, 180 collaborators, 930 suppliers, 1800 publications, 296 early career researchers and 54 countries. Then the second generation of the data gathering had more concentrated character and was performed via an online survey distributed among 152 CLIC suppliers. The feedback was received from 74 hi-tech companies. First, the impacts were assessed from the internal viewpoint using data collected inside the project. Three areas found in earlier research to benefit most were focused on: knowledge formation, technological output, and human capital formation. The particle physics attracts young minds and provide their education and training. Thus, early career researchers benefit via incremental salaries caused by getting first working experience. The scientific community advantages with created knowledge – publications, and its application for their research in terms of citations. Industrial partners profit from increased turnovers and saving in-house resources through the ability to use already existing developments of CLIC. The methodology is heavily built on the previous relevant studies. Opposite to the most part of the preceding studies the assessment was done before the construction phase of a scientific infrastructure and focused only on the past development phase experience. All three impact fields demonstrated as beneficial even already at the study status of the large-scale project. However, the highest benefit/cost ratio belongs to the knowledge output component of profits. The latter is in line with the focal point of this study on the development phase of the CLIC project when the intense procurement has not yet started. The intense procurement and employment belong to construction phase of the project. Second, the impacts were assessed from the external viewpoint through the data collected through an online survey of CLIC suppliers. The methodology was heavily built on the already existing theories about research – industry collaboration. The benefits for industry were determined as innovation, market expansion, marketing image, economic outcome, R&D improvement and learning on processes and services. The main influencing factors were distinguished from the concerned literature and grouped in three sets such as firm attributes, research infrastructure attributes and relationship attributes. Afterwards the linear regression analysis was conducted to define the relationship between six types of benefits and three sets of explanatory factors. It was found that the industrial partners could benefit from the collaboration even at the earlier phase of the fundamental scientific study through increased knowledge, market expansion, marketing image enhancement, economic outcome, improved research and development, and learnings on internal services and processes. The highest statistical significance and models’ fits was demonstrated for knowledge, market expansion, R&D and learning service benefits. The analysis highlighted the importance for companies to participate in scientific events organised by research infrastructures, as well as doing business with other scientific laboratories. On another hand, the Big Science centre can enhance the benefits for industry by simplifying the procurement policy and having well-established communication channels. Hence, the dissertation contributes to two existing contemporary fields as societal impact assessment of fundamental science and research-industry collaboration evaluation. The research shows that a large-scale international study can already create benefits at a very beginning development phase from internal and external point of view. The developed conceptual model can be used to defend the required public investments in fundamental research and to entice prospective industrial partners. Nevertheless, the study introduces limitations in generalisability of the results and recommends the future research on the missing potential beneficial fields from CLIC and a more detailed analysis of the research-industry collaboration by introducing industrial case studies.