That the World Wide Web – invented at CERN – has revolutionized the world of business is clear. Less well known is the lab’s continuing role in transferring Web-based technology to industry. Finnish company Single Source Oy is a case in point.
In the early 1990s CERN was confronted with a big problem – how to manage the estimated 2.5 million documents needed to build its proposed new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Fortunately a solution was at hand in the form of a novel distributed information system developed at the laboratory by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues – the World Wide Web.
The Web, in combination with an initiative set up at the Helsinki Institute of Technology (HUT), has led to the successful transfer of technology and know-how from CERN to the young Helsinki-based company Single Source Oy.
When the LHC project got under way, HUT’s Institute of Particle Physics Technology surveyed competencies available in Finland to identify areas where the country could best contribute. Among their finds was a group at the university’s Institute of Industrial Automation that was studying the development of business processes in large international companies.
LHC testbed
The LHC, as one of the largest international projects that has ever been undertaken, provided an ideal testbed for the group’s nascent ideas, so the project director Ari-Pekka Hameri, together with many of his staff, relocated to CERN. In 1996 they launched TuoviWDM (the Tuovi Web Data Management project). A Finnish girl’s name, Tuovi takes it name from the Finnish acronym for product process visualization.
The TuoviWDM project provided the Web interface to CERN’s commercially-supplied Engineering Data Management System, in which all LHC-related documents reside. The project also interfaced naturally with CoDisCo (the Connecting Distributed Competencies project), run by a consortium of Nordic industrial companies funded by the Nordisk Industrifond. CoDisCo used CERN as a case-study for distributed project management practice, with the intention of transferring CERN’s Web experience across to industry.
Over the years the number of Finnish engineers and students passing through CERN to work on TuoviWDM steadily increased as the project evolved. Take-up at CERN was slow at first, but, when it became apparent that several underlying data management packages were being used – the LHC experiments, for example, do not use the same packages as the accelerator teams – the need for a single platform-independent interface became clear and TuoviWDM fitted the bill. The next question to be asked was how to ensure long-term support for a system that had been designed and built by a small in-house team.
The solution came at the end of 1996 in the form of an agreement between CERN and the Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP), which has responsibility for Finland’s relationship with CERN. Under this agreement, HIP would finance future software development while CERN would continue to provide the necessary infrastructure and support. CERN was also granted an irrevocable, non-exclusive and permanent licence to use TuoviWDM free of charge. “The agreement gives CERN extensive benefits,” explained Dr Hameri, “in return for a modest contribution in terms of infrastructure support and a testbed for the technology.” However, the agreement left the question of long-term support open. Moreover, CERN was not the only body needing such support – companies involved in a TuoviWDM pilot project were also asking for the product to be put on a more solid footing, and so the idea of launching a commercial company was hatched.
At first, TuoviWDM provided a Web-based interface to all documentation related to a particular project. By 1998 this had been deployed in many particle physics research centres around Europe and was being used by about 12 000 people. It was also in 1998 that some of the original HUT people who had worked on the project at CERN started up Single Source Oy to support the software.
Meanwhile, development was still under way at CERN, and the fledgling firm worked hand in hand with the lab to add features that would be invaluable to the LHC project and marketable by the company anywhere where large teams of people had to be managed. It was during this period that TuoviWDM evolved into the commercial product Kronodoc, which not only manages documents – keeping track of authorship and cataloguing modifications – but also provides a powerful management tool by tracking the use of documents.
Kronodoc allows project managers to see who is accessing documents and how they are using them. It distinguishes between viewing and downloading, which roughly equates to the difference between using a document and working on it. The software also builds self-organizing maps that show, at a glance, groups of closely collaborating individuals, as well as isolated groups that have little or no contact. In any large project it is natural for working partnerships to evolve, and for some groups to work closely together at one point in the project’s life and not at another. Engineers, for example, may work more closely with draughtsmen at the beginning of a project than they do as the project evolves. By revealing these working relationships, Kronodoc allows project managers to take the pulse of the project at any moment and then to make sure that all of the necessary working relationships have been put in place.
Today, Single Source Oy is a successful company, the customers of which include a leading manufacturer of both diesel power plants and marine diesel engines, the Wärtsilä corporation. In the view of Ari-Pekka Hameri, who is still at CERN, this success would not have been possible without the close collaboration between CERN, the Finnish institutions and industry. Over the lifetime of the project, some 38 people funded from Finland worked at CERN, collaborating closely with the laboratory’s personnel and making full use of their expertise. TuoviWDM produced 16 master’s theses and contributed to two doctorates, as well as training 18 students on summer placement programmes. These figures alone represent a significant transfer of technology through people, given that 80% of these students have so far found jobs in industry. According to Dr Hameri, “This flexible exchange of students and researchers, which could be coordinated to the changing needs of the development work, is a unique and highly positive feature of research institutes like CERN.”
Turning inventions into companies
In Finland an invention is the property of its inventor, not of the institution where s/he works. Moreover, the country encourages institutions to support inventors who wish to turn their ideas into companies. “The recent success of Finnish high-technology industry is at least partly due to this type of supportive environment,” said Dr Hameri, who intended to apply a similar approach to TuoviWDM. CERN’s technology-transfer policy, while not identical to Finland’s, allowed him to do so. CERN holds the intellectual property rights to the inventions of its personnel, but the lab’s policy is to publish all of its results, making them available to industry. This allowed members of the TuoviWDM team to take the ideas that they had developed at CERN and seek venture capital to establish a company.
With agreements between CERN, HIP and Single Source Oy guaranteeing the transfer of technology to the new company, Single Source Oy secured the funding that it needed in 2000 and the company now employs some 21 people, 14 of whom have worked on TuoviWDM at CERN. For its part, CERN has the long-term support that it needs, and one of its member states has a tangible return on its investment in basic science.
