Journal of Operations Management最新文献

{"title":"Beyond the Yield: Enhancing Agricultural Sustainability Through Operations Management","authors":"Christian F. Durach, Dayna Simpson, Frank Wiengarten, Zhaohui Wu","doi":"10.1002/joom.1375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1375","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Historical records indicate that the collapse of many ancient civilizations, such as those of the Sumer, the Mayans, the Indus Valley, and Rome, was partly driven by the failure of agricultural systems (Diamond <span>2011</span>; Raman <span>2024</span>). Many modern farming systems around the globe are potentially approaching similar failures as they struggle with critical challenges such as changing climate or soil biodiversity loss, pressures to reduce costs, new technologies, and infectious diseases or pest outbreaks such as avian bird-flu (Caserta et al. <span>2024</span>; Chen and Chen <span>2021</span>; Cinner et al. <span>2022</span>; Guo et al. <span>2022</span>; Shi (Junmin) et al. <span>2019</span>).</p><p>Agriculture remains essential to the continuity and stability of human civilization. Recognizing its central role, the United Nations has designated ending hunger and achieving food security as a core Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2). Yet competing pressures to increase agricultural output and lower costs are more often than not in conflict with constraints on natural resources, which have led to major challenges for agricultural supply chains and the environment, its labor force (e.g., increased exploitation, migration), and animals in the system (Howard and Forin <span>2019</span>; Rossi and Garner <span>2014</span>; Wiengarten and Durach <span>2021</span>; Yang et al. <span>2024</span>). Furthermore, these conflicts have been exacerbated by power imbalances between large markets and small suppliers, and because the degradation of agricultural regions has taken a proportionally greater toll on less well-developed economies (Gómez and Lee <span>2023</span>).</p><p>Scholarly attention to production systems within the agricultural economics domain has a long history (Le Gal et al. <span>2011</span>). In recent years, researchers in this field have focused increasingly on identifying more sustainable methods of agricultural production (e.g., Campi et al. <span>2021</span>; Christiaensen et al. <span>2021</span>; Giller et al. <span>2021</span>; Jayne and Sanchez <span>2021</span>; Rehman et al. <span>2022</span>; Touch et al. <span>2024</span>). This has sought, for example, more efficient, less impactful, or technology-driven methods of production that improve yield and reduce harm. These topics are very much in the wheelhouse of the operations management (OM) discipline, yet contributions from OM researchers that explore within, or offer solutions to agricultural systems, have been limited. Given OM's foundational focus on production processes and systems, however, our field is uniquely positioned to meaningfully address the challenges currently facing global agricultural production systems.</p><p>In the present paper, we recognize and reflect on this gap in OM in order to provide a foundation for the special issue (SI) on sustainable agriculture. The goal of the SI was to achieve two key objectives: (i) raise awareness within","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 4","pages":"516-528"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1375","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Switching the Telescope Lens: A Sociomaterial Perspective of Sustainable Agricultural (Proto)Practices Transfer in an Agrifood Supply Chain","authors":"Minelle E. Silva,&nbsp;Karina A. Santos,&nbsp;Susana C. F. Pereira,&nbsp;Linda C. Hendry","doi":"10.1002/joom.1369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This study investigates the implementation and transfer of sustainable agricultural practices (SUSAPs) across a multitier agrifood supply chain (SC) using Brazilian poultry farming as the empirical context. We conduct an interpretive case study of buyer–supplier–subsupplier triads, including those certified under Global Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and noncertified counterparts, using interviews, observations, and secondary data. Adopting a sociomaterial perspective, we investigate how SUSAPs' components—meanings, materials, and competencies—are embedded within specific SC tiers and transferred across the triad. A zoom-in analysis reveals that only animal welfare is a fully adopted practice, whereas waste management, working conditions, and biosecurity remain in development as protopractices. A zoom-out analysis of SUSAPs' components shows limited buyer influence across the triad, while first-tier suppliers facilitate SUSAP transfer. We advance theory by demonstrating how a sociomaterial perspective explains the degree of SUSAPs' implementation and transfer, and introducing the <i>boomerang effect</i>, illustrating how first-tier suppliers enable SUSAP implementation among certified and noncertified subsuppliers to ensure safer and more sustainable products. These insights help managers transfer SUSAPs into their SCs by leveraging first-tier suppliers as boundary spanners.</p>","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 4","pages":"529-549"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Power to Sustainability? Unpacking the Role of Justice in Agricultural Commodity Supply Networks","authors":"Felipe Alexandre de Lima,&nbsp;Evelyne Vanpoucke,&nbsp;Stefan Gold,&nbsp;Stefan Seuring","doi":"10.1002/joom.1372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1372","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Agricultural commodity supply networks in the Global South are essential for securing the global supply of crops and livestock. However, they are challenged by power asymmetries, which cause injustice and jeopardize social equity, environmental stewardship, and economic viability for disadvantaged actors. To address this challenge, it is imperative to understand how power impacts justice and sustainability. To this end, we examined a supply network in Mato Grosso, Brazil, that faced power asymmetries through 49 semi-structured interviews, field observations, and archival data. The analysis unveiled three forms of power use—excessive, strategic, and balanced—and associated tactics, impacting justice and sustainability outcomes in various ways. We illustrate, for example, how excessive power manifested in traders' abusive tactics, who compelled farmers to accept quality discounts due to external factors, such as heavy rain or poor road conditions. In response to these injustices, farmers cascaded the pressure through the supply network, disproportionately affecting disadvantaged actors, for instance, by withholding rural workers' wages for low productivity or eradicating wildlife deemed detrimental to profitability. Based on these findings, we provide a set of six propositions and a theoretical model that elucidate how power can be leveraged to foster fairer and more sustainable agricultural commodity supply networks.</p>","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 4","pages":"550-574"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1372","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empirically Grounding Analytics (EGA) Research: Approaches, Contributions, and Examples","authors":"Arnd Huchzermeier,&nbsp;Panos Kouvelis","doi":"10.1002/joom.1373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1373","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Empirically Grounding Analytics (EGA) in operations and supply chain management is a research area at the intersection of empirical and analytical studies. Spearman and Hopp (&lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;) identified it as an underserved research area with great opportunity for input. To clarify what EGA is, we use a quote provided in the JOM editorial on the subject (see de Treville et al. (&lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;)) as a definition: “an EGA paper combines mathematical, stochastic, and/or economic modeling with empirical data…. Empirically grounding an analytic model creates knowledge by linking analytical insights to what has been observed using empirical methods (such as case studies, action research, field experiments, interviews, or analysis of secondary data) to establish a theoretically and empirically relevant question.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;De Treville et al. (&lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;) propose a framework for discussing EGA research approaches and assessing contributions, summarized in Figure 1 of their editorial. We will refer to this framework rather extensively in our discussion of work in this Special Issue. We provide a “deconstructed” version of this figure, with some added details, in Figure 1.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Research in “empirical grounding” of analytical models can be conceptually viewed as offering two different ways to drive research and lead to impactful contributions. The “left side” approach has as its end goal to establish analytical models verifiably linked to data and observations reflecting the real operational setting. This approach contributes a “calibrated fit” of the model to the operational decision reality. It requires careful empirical justification of modeling assumptions and parameters. The calibration of model parameters involves collecting representative data from the realistic setting, with any remaining model assumptions and approximations well justified for the real situation. The expectation of these grounded models is a high quality of solutions for the approximated real decision problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The “right side” approach pursues empirical assessment of model results, solution quality, and applicability of insights in addressing issues encountered in real practice. It carefully verifies that (a) an effective implementation of the model reasonably and accurately depicts the operational setting and decision situation; (b) the obtained solutions lead to improved performance; and (c) incorporating analytical insights and tools leads to improved managerial practice for this setting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, “left side” research leads to well-calibrated models with strong hints for improved solution quality and useful insights to be further tested in the real setting and actual practice. “Right side” research carefully tests and confirms the wisdom of new insights and tools, leading to improved practice in the operational setting. However, such testing and analytical insights may reveal irregularities and complexities not effectively depicted in the models, thus","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 4","pages":"418-425"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1373","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Operations Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry","authors":"Gopesh Anand,&nbsp;George P. Ball,&nbsp;John V. Gray,&nbsp;Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee","doi":"10.1002/joom.1365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1365","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has an annual revenue of $1.2 trillion and employs approximately two million people worldwide (Brocker &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;). The drugs produced by the operations of this industry, which include all activities from scientific innovation to supply chain management, play an important role in the health and well-being of millions of people around the world (OECD &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt;). Recent disruptions, especially the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed critical limitations in global pharmaceutical operations, spurring widespread concern (Shih &lt;span&gt;2020&lt;/span&gt;). In the U.S., the Biden Administration deemed pharmaceuticals one of four critical national supply chains, the others being semiconductors, large capacity batteries, and minerals (White House &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). Further, Congress mandated a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) focused on securing the nation's medical product supply chains against quality and supply disruptions (NASEM &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;). Despite the recognition of its importance, operational challenges in this industry remain prevalent. Drug shortages reached a record high in 2024 (ASHP &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;), and their duration has been increasing (USP &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;). Further, quality issues remain common (e.g., Callahan et al. &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;), and the drug recall trend continues to climb (Ghijs et al. &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The opacity and complexity of pharmaceutical operations are two factors driving the continued quality and resilience issues. As Figure 1 depicts, much of the complexity in the U.S. pharmaceuticals industry stems from intermediaries and payors, who are often vertically integrated and powerful, and who can create and benefit from opacity. Additional complexity comes from the roles of powerful regulators, who oversee, among other things, approvals to produce drugs and ongoing drug quality and safety. We discuss many of these forms of opacity and complexity in detail in the next section.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Operations such as these call for rigorous academic explorations that highlight the unique context of the industry (Joglekar et al. &lt;span&gt;2016&lt;/span&gt;). Operations scholars, for example, can address questions related to balancing cost and quality (Lapré and Scudder &lt;span&gt;2004&lt;/span&gt;; Parmigiani et al. &lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;), enhancing the resilience of operations and supply chains (Kim et al. &lt;span&gt;2015&lt;/span&gt;; Shen and Sun &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;), implementing new technologies (Angelopoulos et al. &lt;span&gt;2023&lt;/span&gt;), and demonstrating benefits to, and ways to establish, greater transparency (Buell et al. &lt;span&gt;2017&lt;/span&gt;; Lee et al. &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). Further, operations researchers can identify the role that powerful regulators, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), play with regards to operational performance dimensions such as innovation, resilience, cost, and quality (Wang et al. &lt;span&gt;2025&lt;/span&gt;). Despite all that operations scho","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 3","pages":"302-313"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1365","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143818612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Encounter Decisions for Patients With Diverse Sociodemographic Characteristics: Predictive Analytics of EMR Data From a Large Chain of Clinics","authors":"Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee,&nbsp;Han Ye,&nbsp;Dilip Chhajed","doi":"10.1002/joom.1363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1363","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Managing chronic diabetes care is a major challenge faced by healthcare organizations because it requires resource commitment over a long duration, high levels of patient engagement in the care process, and the socioeconomic and racial diversity of the patient population significantly affect care outcomes. Therefore, it is important to personalize chronic care treatment to improve chronic care outcomes. We propose a decision framework for the predictive management of diabetes that can help reduce the population-level risk of diabetes. We use machine learning on clinical measures, demographics, and socioeconomic status of a large patient population from a chain of clinics in the Midwestern United States to predict the future health conditions of individual diabetes patients. Furthermore, we use the predictive analytic model outcome to build a decision analytic framework to optimally allocate encounters to individual patients. Also, we propose a heuristic solution to the optimal resource allocation model for implementation purposes. We make theoretical and methodological contributions by identifying and combining clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors to predict future diabetes risk for patients and demonstrate the use of the predicted risks for optimal resource utilization. Another significant contribution is demonstrating that a data-driven predictive encounter allocation, considering the socioeconomic and demographic factors influencing health risks across patient populations, can promote more equitable healthcare delivery. Finally, we discuss implementation issues and actions.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 4","pages":"447-482"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144206998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards the Integration of Precision Medicine in Psychiatric Care Delivery: Evaluating the Impact of Clinical Guidelines on Drug-Related Adverse Events","authors":"Jingwen Yang,&nbsp;Anant Mishra,&nbsp;Kingshuk K. Sinha","doi":"10.1002/joom.1353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1353","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Despite the immense potential of precision medicine to revolutionize healthcare, its integration into routine clinical practice remains a significant challenge. This study investigates the impact of Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) guidelines, which provide synthesized evidence and pharmacogenetics-based drug dosing recommendations, on the delivery of psychiatric care enabled by precision medicine. Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of CPIC guidelines on serious drug-related adverse events and explore how drug characteristics related to therapeutic uncertainty, namely drug age and drug label warning, moderate this effect. Our findings suggest that the availability of CPIC guidelines is associated with almost a 25% decrease in serious drug-related adverse events in the context of psychiatric care delivery enabled by precision medicine. Furthermore, we find that the presence of drug label warning, as FDA-endorsed negative news on pharmacogenetics-related drug use, enhances the effect of CPIC guidelines and is associated with a further decrease in serious drug-related adverse events. Post hoc analysis reveals that CPIC guidelines with high strength of evidence are associated with a significant decrease in serious drug-related adverse events, while no such effect is observed for guidelines with low strength of evidence. These findings contribute to the nascent literature on integrating precision medicine into routine clinical practice, highlighting the consequential role of clinical guidelines in improving the effectiveness of psychiatric care delivery for individual patients enabled by precision medicine. In addition, by demonstrating how the development and implementation of robust clinical guidelines are central to minimizing serious drug-related adverse events, the findings have policy implications for minimizing the downside risks of psychiatric care delivery.</p>","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 3","pages":"393-414"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1353","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143818694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gomory Award Highlights the Impact of Industry Studies Research at JOM","authors":"John Paul MacDuffie","doi":"10.1002/joom.1356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1356","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;For two consecutive years, articles published in the &lt;i&gt;Journal of Operations Management&lt;/i&gt; (JOM) have received the Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award, given annually by the Industry Studies Association (ISA). This achievement is unprecedented and a testimony to JOM's encouragement and support of industry studies research. It also speaks to the remarkable broad impact on firms and industries that the journal continues to provide. In the interest of encouraging future outstanding work of this kind, I here provide a short introduction to industry studies, the ISA, and the Gomory Award. The remaining discussion is devoted to accounts from the authors of the award-winning articles on the “backstory” of their research.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The “industry studies” idea—that much can be learned from close study of industrial activity—dates to the Industrial Revolution. In &lt;i&gt;The Wealth of Nations&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;span&gt;1976&lt;/span&gt;), Adam Smith famously chose to explain the advantages of a specialized division of labor for productivity by providing a detailed explication of the production process in a pin factory. Advocacy for industry studies as a method of scholarship began with Alfred Marshall and his attention to industrial districts in &lt;i&gt;The Economics of Industry&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;span&gt;1879&lt;/span&gt;). Competing firms locate near each other in such a district to gain the benefits of agglomeration—of skilled labor, production inputs, technological expertise, and customer demand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Marshall was perhaps the first—but surely not the last—to advocate for direct observation as the best way “to get the direct feel of the economic world, more intimate than merely reading descriptions, enabling one to set things in their true scale of importance” (Pigou &lt;span&gt;1925&lt;/span&gt;, describing Marshall's work). Proponents of an industry studies approach see a path to better research questions and the generation of insights that equally inform theory and practice. Attention to industry context opens the door to more varied and valid data; good access allows researchers to “wallow in the data—to get down and dirty with the data” (Hamermesh &lt;span&gt;2008&lt;/span&gt;). Seeking to take advantage of such access can point the way towards the most appropriate (and often multiple) research methods. A phenomenon or empirical puzzle may initiate an industry studies inquiry while the insights may often be “pre-theory” contributions that stimulate further research rather than providing confirmatory testing of pre-determined hypotheses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gomory and Sloan staff saw MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) as a prototype. At the time, IMVP was completing a five-year research program that led to the best-selling book &lt;i&gt;The Machine That Changed the World&lt;/i&gt; about the rise of lean production (aka Toyota Production System) as an alternate production paradigm that challenged traditional mass production. Susan Helper, the first Department Editor for JOM's Public Policy Department, and I were among the cor","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 2","pages":"293-297"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1356","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143639005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Convergence of Product, Production, and Supply Chain Design Rules: Evidence From Pharmaceutical Pre-Competitive Collaboration Networks","authors":"Jagjit Singh Srai,&nbsp;Tomás Seosamh Harrington,&nbsp;Nitin R. Joglekar,&nbsp;Sriram Narayanan","doi":"10.1002/joom.1352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1352","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We address a trans-specialist learning and coordination question in pre-competitive manufacturing R&amp;D networks: how do early-stage consortia develop products across “dissimilar” (where knowledge requirements are different, and not solely based within) specialized networks? A unique aspect of the R&amp;D consortia is that they integrate knowledge across product, production, and supply chain domains. This paper uses network ethnography as the methodology—in combining social network analysis with ethnographic methods—while drawing on a 10-year dataset on the evolution of pre-competitive collaboration networks in pharmaceutical continuous manufacturing deploying digital technologies. Our analysis reveals mechanisms through which design rules for products and processes are developed and converged across product, production, and supply chain domains. Specifically, we show that design rules, which are both “set-based” and “trans-specialized”, are the key mechanisms that enable heterogeneous specialist stakeholders to exchange knowledge and facilitate the convergence of development efforts. Second, we highlight the roles of boundary spanners and institutional actors (i.e., academia and regulatory bodies) in steering dialogues towards the convergence of design rules in early-stage R&amp;D settings. The theoretical implications of these findings are not only germane to pharmaceutical drug development networks but also to early-stage product and technology development networks at large.</p>","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 3","pages":"314-334"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1352","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143818806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Innovations, Technologies, and the Economics of Last-Mile Operations: A Call for Research in Operations Management","authors":"Niels Agatz,&nbsp;Jan C. Fransoo,&nbsp;Elliot Rabinovich,&nbsp;Rui Sousa","doi":"10.1002/joom.1355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1355","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;p&gt;Last mile operations (LMO), the processes involved in the critical last stage of delivering goods and services, have widespread relevance across major sectors of the economy, including retail, food services, healthcare, humanitarian services, energy distribution, telecommunications, public services, and others. These operations account for a significant portion of the costs, jobs, and economic output in these sectors. Global economic output involving last mile deliveries alone, for instance, is valued at $165 billion per year and is growing at about 10% per year (InsightAce Analytic &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Recent decades have witnessed an acceleration in the rate of evolution of LMO (Agatz et al. &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;; Boutilier and Chan &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;; Boyer and Hult &lt;span&gt;2005&lt;/span&gt;; Dreischerf and Buijs &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;; He and Goh &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;; Lyu and Teo &lt;span&gt;2022&lt;/span&gt;). Technology-driven innovations have catalyzed profound changes in the planning, design, and execution of LMO, with significant implications for the economics of these operations. Extending the last mile to the final user has increased convenience, accessibility, and reliability. Zipline, for example, has introduced drones to safely deliver lifesaving products in remote communities (Ackerman and Koziol &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;). An increasing number of pharmacies in Europe and Africa have been equipped with smart lockers to allow 24/7 access to critical medicines (Gobir et al. &lt;span&gt;2024&lt;/span&gt;). Some innovations leveraging platforms based on smartphone apps have given small corner stores in neighborhoods in cities across Latin America the means to sell and deliver daily groceries and other household staples to local residents (Escamilla et al. &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;). Other innovations, leveraging artificial intelligence, have found applications in vehicle routing tools and warehouse and fulfillment automation (such as Ocado's system (Mason &lt;span&gt;2019&lt;/span&gt;)), track-and-trace systems that provide real-time communications and visibility into delivery processes (such as Instacart and Uber Eats), anticipatory shipping algorithms to move inventories to specific areas ahead of realized demand (Chen and Graves &lt;span&gt;2021&lt;/span&gt;), and integration tools with third-party services (successfully deployed by ClickPost and ShipEngine).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, considerable challenges remain. For example, because of short time frames and high delivery volumes to many dispersed locations, LMO have little room for human error. Yet, since many firms tend to tap into low-skilled, temporary, or crowdsourced labor to provide these services, there is high variability in performance and worker availability. LMO are also expensive, due in part to rising labor costs, delivery failures, more demanding customers, and vehicle and parking restrictions. Although academic research in LMO has a long tradition in Operations Research (see e.g., Agatz et al. (&lt;span&gt;2011&lt;/span&gt;), Otto et al. (&lt;span&gt;2018&lt;/span&gt;), Boy","PeriodicalId":51097,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Operations Management","volume":"71 2","pages":"166-175"},"PeriodicalIF":6.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joom.1355","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143639181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}