Engaging lay people to build a resilient Big Science organization? Some preliminary insights

Knowledge co-production in “Big Science” projects – i.e. scientific endeavours characterized by organizational complexity due to their size, exploratory nature, and diversity of participating specializations, cultures, and individual orientations (Child, Ihrig, and Merali, 2014) – is a brand-new concept, which is based on the assumption that lay people are able to establish dynamic and contingent relationships with professional researchers and/or expert scientists, in an attempt to contribute in forming, validating, and adapting knowledge (Bonney et al., 2014). Our aim here is to draw a more comprehensive picture of this phenomenon, in order to better frame, on the one hand, the conceptual and contextual underpinnings of knowledge co-production in Big Science and, on the other hand, to disentangle the role played by lay people who – as volunteers – support expert scientists in pushing forward scientific knowledge. Also, this paper focuses on how knowledge co-production empowers Big Science organizations’ capacity and dynamic reach, enabling them to develop a greater ability to manage unforeseen and/or unforeseeable external forces and to become more resilient.