Finding the time to explore disruption
A conversation with Paolo Petagna on the privilege of having a fully dedicated student to look for innovation.
Paolo Petagna was one of the first at CERN to believe that incorporating "fresh student minds" to the scientific teams of ATTRACT projects could highly accelerate the finding of breakthrough technology applications. "Scientists often lack the time to look for something disruptive because they're too focused in achieving scientific results", he says. At IdeaSquare, he offered his ATTRACT project Smart Wall Pipes and ducts (SWaP) to be used as a pilot and hired a student from the Aalto University to help him find innovative spinoff applications for his developed technologies.
"If we decide to replicate this pilot also for Phase 2, IdeaSquare should definitely be the place to carry it out."
Paolo Petagna wanted to bring a "fresh mind" into IdeaSquare "because it's a place that, despite being inside CERN, does not only work in the field of physics but also on social aspects, the industry, the economy, etc." Aware of that, he contacted the IdeaSquare team and they arranged to hire a student for him to work in his ATTRACT project at IdeaSquare. "In the few weeks she was there, she came up with brilliant ideas", he proclaims fondly.
"This was something we had wanted to explore for a long time", Paolo explains. We wanted to "hire someone for a specific, sort of niche project and 'inject' them into the IdeaSquare environment to see what kind of innovative ideas she would be able to come up with". At the end of her stay, she admitted that "choosing IdeaSquare had been a great decision, because she had been able to exchange many seminal ideas with other students, get as creative as she wanted, and work on innovative approaches she would have never thought of by herself".
On the same line, Paolo admits that it's sometimes difficult for scientists to "drift away from our experiments and make time to find new applications for our technologies". "We don't have the time to analyze what the current societal challenges are and what can still be considered 'innovation'", he says. "In my case, if I had to do it myself, I would probably go to the "classical industries": car builders, the airplane industry, mechanical companies… Having a student entering the game as a 'blank canvas' gave me the opportunity to explore newer, disruptive approaches", he concludes.
"In an ideal world, I would spend more time at IdeaSquare's wonderful facilities —to get more experimental, to play with their equipment, and to try to develop new applications for my technologies."
One of the facts that Paolo likes most about IdeaSquare is its approach to multidisciplinarity, though he also considers it to be a double-edged sword. He often asks himself, "should we be specializing ourselves in only one topic or should we be looking at things from different angles?". "Should CERN only be doing physics because this is what the CERN mandate dictates, or should we broaden our perspective and try to look for alternative fields on which to apply our technologies?". He admits not knowing the answer to this "because it's not an easy question". "All I know, is that IdeaSquare’s approach for innovation and multidisciplinarity is certainly the way to go."
Paolo Petagna is a CERN engineer. For more than 10 years, he participated in the design, construction and installation of the Central Tracker Detector of the CMS experiment at LHC. Since 2009, he leads the Detector Cooling Project of the CERN Physics Department in collaboration with many European academic and industrial partners. At IdeaSquare, he coordinates the ATTRACT project SWaP (Smart wall pipes and ducts) jointly with Sébastien Lani.