Imperatives of the science of operations and supply-chain management

Although knowledge in operations and supply-chain management (O&SCM) has advanced substantially during the last six decades, our community has not fully utilized the potential for radical innovations. We identify two sets of opportunities for pursuing radical innovations. First, there is an opportunity to pursue all phases of science, including exploratory and qualitative research, developing theories, causation and internal validity, and testing models and theories for external validity (the ability to generalize knowledge to other situations). This would broaden the domain covered by each research effort, minimize the bias resulting from the choice of research paradigm and research domain, to enhance external validity, and to minimize the gap between our research efforts and the real world our community seeks to reshape. Second, there is an opportunity to pursue multiple perspectives because a scientific conclusion valid for a narrow domain may prove to be partially true or even false if one obtains multiple perspectives. Multiple perspectives can be obtained by investigating different parts of the system, by employing different methods of analysis, by using different sources of data, or by using different subsets of the same data. Developing scientific knowledge requires pursuit of all phases of science and of multiple perspectives. In a separate paper, we propose and analyze ways to accomplish it. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.