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

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. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt this work, but you must attribute this work as “Operations Research. Copyright © 2017 INFORMS. https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.1080.0519 , used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .”