President's Desk
The Science of Globalization
By James Bean
INFORMS President
jbean@umich.edu
Nearly all members of INFORMS are facing globalization of their environment. In industry this is evident. Motor Trend magazine no longer awards "Car of the Year" and "Import Car of the Year." They combined the two awards to just the "Car of the Year" because they could not determine which entries were domestic or import any more. Some Acuras have been designed and built in the United States by a Japanese company. Some Jaguars are designed and built in Great Britain by an American company. In the new economy globalization is a given. But academia is globalizing as well. MIT has extensive programs with the University of Cambridge and the National University of Singapore. Georgia Tech is in Singapore and also has a branch campus in Metz, France. Michigan is co-directing the Departments of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. All of these relationships reach far beyond traditional student exchanges. They involve significant faculty and academic culture exchange.
Globalization has also created pressure on European and Asian universities to look toward global alliances. Both the Technical University of Munich and SUPAERO in Toulouse, France, are developing BS-MS-PhD structures, taught partly in English, to enable their students to easily include exchange programs in the United States and Britain into their studies, and to enable American and British students to study locally. This structure is quite a departure from the traditional French and German systems. The Shanghai Jiao Tong program mentioned above will be primarily taught in English as well.
Why are universities around the world globalizing? Many feel that the traditional on-campus university format will be changing dramatically. The Internet makes delivery of education at a distance a real competitor to the traditional model. This is particularly true in professional and continuing education programs. Many argue that the on-campus experience is superior to a completely distance-delivered education. But as distance technology advances, the preference narrows.
I witnessed a course last fall in which teams of students competed in a product-design exercise lead by a group of faculty from three continents. Each team consisted of two American, two Dutch and two Korean students. The teams worked together only via teleconference, e-mail and Internet-based collaboration software. The new videoconference systems were so advanced that you had the sense that everyone was in the same room (well, almost). At the end of the term the students finally met, and it seemed that they had been friends for a long time. They really had gelled as teams, entirely through distance means.
Does this imply that the for-profit, virtual university will be the new model? Very few appear to believe so. But the actions of many major universities to globalize suggests an alternative. Perhaps a small number of university families that cover the major regions of the world will develop. Within a family, universities may share courses, accept each other's credits and cooperate in truly innovative pedagogy and research. An analogy is the formation of extended networks of airline service provided by groups of separate legal entities but with boundaries nearly transparent to the customers.
What does all this mean for INFORMS? OR/MS professionals and educators will increasingly need to work across cultural and political boundaries. The organizations for which they work will most likely have operations or partners in many countries requiring a facility with cross-cultural teams.
Further, the importance of OR/MS work in information systems and supply-chain integration makes us prime integrators for the global enterprises of the next century. Globalization is an opportunity to highlight the contributions that OR/MS methodology can make to the new economy and to team OR/MS professionals across cultures as the core of broader global teams. We need to establish OR/MS as the science of globalization.
How can INFORMS help companies, universities and our members prepare for globalization? We can highlight the power of OR/MS work in developing effective global organizations. We can provide a platform to share best practices in global education. We can report on applications of OR/MS in other cultures, highlighting how cultural differences influenced the implementation of OR/MS. We can cooperate in international conferences to help globalize our members directly.
INFORMS meetings can bring academics and practitioners from many countries together — making personal contacts that enable institutional cooperation. Working closely with the International Federation of OR Societies, we are planning many such events. In 2003, we will jointly host a meeting with EURO in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2004, we will have a joint meeting in Banff with the Canadian OR Society.
Our subdivisions are also reaching out globally. This year alone the Section on Group Decision and Negotiation is holding a meeting in France, and the Marketing Science Conference will be held in Germany. In May we will present the first INFORMS conference highlighting real-world applications. The conference theme: "Optimizing the Extended Enterprise in the New Economy."
The opportunity is here. Let us know other ways that INFORMS can participate in the globalization of industry, academia and OR/MS. Please send ideas to jbean@umich.edu.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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