Knowledge leadership in global scientific research

Despite burgeoning literature on knowledge transfer, relatively little is known about how strategic knowledge is created and exchanged and, specifically, the influence of leadership in stimulating and marshalling successful innovation. We frame this process as a dynamic capability that is primarily inter-organisational; it is also highly complex, hard to grasp and hard to imitate and calls for knowledge leadership, a qualitatively different kind of leadership from that which characterises more traditional industrial economies. This poses particular challenges for human resource (HR) specialists seeking to promote knowledge leadership across institutional and cultural boundaries. We report on preliminary findings from interviews with scientists working in a global particle physics experiment being conducted in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (an abbreviation of the French version of European Organisation for Nuclear Research), Switzerland. Given that this collaboration (a global set of loosely coupled, non-hierarchical networks) is prototypical of many international knowledge-based enterprises, the findings will help to inform the HR requirements for successful knowledge leadership.