Creativity and constraints in large-scale collaboration

Across the sciences, we observe an increase in the number and size of research collaborations – between groups, laboratories, institutions; across countries and disciplines. In the collective pursuit of a shared scientific goal, the modes, scale, and intensity of collaboration may vary, from the collective funding, design, construction and operation of experiments and their supporting infrastructures, to the collective analysis, authorship and publication of results. These different modes of collaboration in turn may foster specific research practices and types of innovation while constraining others, as they require coordination and compromises between individual members, groups, and institutions.

Considering that creativity is traditionally both considered a prerequisite of scientific innovation and ascribed to individuals and their ideas, we ask how creativity emerges in different collaborative environments, how collaborations foster or impede creativity, and how this relates to the specific constraints that large-scale collaborations pose on scientific practice. Who is the subject of creative ideas in a research collective, and what makes ideas creative? How do organizational practices, the centralization and standardization of instruments and methods, or the adherence to procedural guidelines affect creativity in collaborations? On the other hand, how can collaborations actively sustain and foster creativity? Are there tensions between individual and collaborative creativity, or between other kinds of creativity? How are they resolved?

This symposium invites contributions from social studies of science, philosophy, and history of science that tackle these and other questions exploring different notions of creativity and constraints at work in large-scale collaborations across the sciences.