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The OR/MS Ecosystem: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

Cass Business School, City University London, London EC1Y 8TZ, United Kingdom
Anderson School, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
m.sodhi{at}city.ac.uk
ctang{at}anderson.ucla.edu

This paper is dedicated to Arthur Geoffrion, who serves as role model of a great researcher, educator, and practitioner.

We believe that research, teaching, and practice are becoming increasingly disengaged from one another in the OR/MS ecosystem. This ecosystem comprises researchers, educators, and practitioners in its core along with end users, universities, and funding agencies. Continuing disengagement will result in OR/MS occupying only niche areas and disappearing as a distinct field even though its tools would live on. To understand the reasons for this disengagement better and to engender discussion among academics and practitioners on how to counter it, we present the ecosystem's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Incorporated in this paper are insights from a cluster of sessions at the 2006 INFORMS meeting in Pittsburgh ("Where Do We Want to Go in OR/MS?") and from the literature.

Subject classifications: operations research; management science; SWOT analysis; ecosystem; change management.
History: Received April 2007; revision received August 2007; accepted November 2007.

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