O.R. instructors have an opportunity that marketing professionals would die for: Week in and week out we have this audience that is important to the future of O.R. as "captives." We have the opportunity to market the O.R. profession to this group. There are also personal reasons for O.R. instructors to engage in some "marketing" activity. Students who can see the value in what is being taught — and are interested and engaged in the classroom activities — make for an enjoyable and personally rewarding experience for the instructor. Elective courses that are oversubscribed bring prestige and perhaps additional resources to a department. Having enthusiastic and supportive students brings a host of both professional and personal rewards to the professor.

"Marketing O.R." to students is a bit different from marketing the profession to CEOs. I am not talking about running ads or offering free goodies, but simply framing our instruction and designing our courses in a way that students will find interesting, stimulating and even exciting. Students taking O.R. courses are not a homogeneous group: there are applied mathematicians, statisticians, engineers and business students with backgrounds from nuclear science to poetry. Each student audience will have different interest drivers, and each instructor will have to customize any marketing efforts to each particular audience. My own experience has been almost exclusively limited to teaching business students interested in "general management." I have no idea what might work for other disciplines, but here are some framing ideas that seem to work pretty well for business students.

1. Clearly differentiate O.R. from operations management. Operations management is a business function that is an attractive career option for only a minority of business students. O.R. provides a way of approaching problems in finance, investment banking, marketing and consulting — all careers of interest to ambitious business students. Framing the O.R. course as a course in decision-making for a set of problems of direct interest to the majority of the class is a good start.

Making this differentiation can be as simple as choosing your words and your examples carefully. When introducing linear programming, use a portfolio example, a combinatorial auction or a media selection model rather than the usual manufacturing example. Introduce probabilities in the context of finance or insurance rather than machines breaking down. If you need a data set to demonstrate statistical tools such as regression or t-tests, pick an example from e-commerce or retail sales. The use of examples like these broadens the course, adds interest for the many students not interested in operations, and makes the point that O.R. methods can be broadly applied.

2. Emphasize that O.R. is useful in strategic and tactical decision-making and not just operations level decisions. The first O.R. group was assembled to address a tactical problem: how to respond with fighter aircraft when incoming bombers were spotted on the new-fangled radar. An important early success was analysis of a major strategic decision: Should the British war cabinet keep fighters in France (where aircraft losses were considerable) or withdraw the French-based squadrons to the British mainland and prepare them to fight the Battle of Britain? Somewhere in the last 50 years O.R. became identified with elegant mathematical solutions to production- and operations-level problems, but this doesn't mean we have to teach inventory management and production scheduling.

New product launches, media purchasing, new plant location, research and development project selection, real options, weather derivatives, product pricing and buying property at auction are just a few examples of high-level business problems that provide the opportunity to demonstrate the value of standard O.R. methods. By emphasizing the value of a structured O.R. analysis as an input to high-level decisions, the point can be made than executives who can perform or understand such analysis will be better off than those who cannot. By exposing students to these kinds of real high-level decision issues, they will be well prepared if they encounter these same kinds of problems on the job. Knowledge of O.R. can be pitched as a source of personal competitive advantage to the ambitious graduate.

3. Choose your vocabulary with care. Marketers take great care with the slogans and words that they use; there does not necessarily have to be a one-to-one mapping between the words we use in our research and those we use in the classroom. The importance of vocabulary was brought home to me very sharply a few years ago when we were in the midst of yet another MBA curriculum review. Recent graduates and executives were surveyed and asked about the importance of various topics in our course. "Linear programming" was rated a complete zero, even though it was a fair chunk of our course. Other topics in the course (particularly decision trees and simulation) didn't rate very highly either. Somewhat panicked, we arranged for another survey and changed the words. Solving "simultaneous decision problems" was rated very important by 80+ percent of the executives; "decision and risk analysis" achieved an almost 100 percent importance rating. Our course survived, and we changed the titles of most of our topics.

I realize that words are a sensitive issue in the O.R. community, but it is important to recognize that some words and phrases are much more appealing to students than others. For example, a course titled "competing with analytics" is much more appealing to business students than one called either "management science" or "operations research" (or some combination of the two). Other words that we understand (such as stochastic, Markov, linear programming) are a complete mystery to many students. The key question is whether you can teach O.R. without referring to linear, integer or mathematical programming, or decision trees or stochastic simulation.

I see O.R. as a body of knowledge and skills that can be indexed and accessed under different labels. It is more important to me that our future managers are interested in learning the usefulness of the O.R. body of knowledge and how to use it than to learn the words we use as researchers when we extend the body of knowledge. However, I also recognize that this is an area where instructors will have strong feelings and will want to make up their own minds.

4. Show that O.R. can be especially advantageous in the entry-level job. Most business students aspire to be CEOs, but it is hard to get a CEO position right after graduation. Entry-level jobs, especially in investment banking, financial services, human resources or marketing usually require performing lots of analysis. Good Excel skills together with a strong understanding of modeling and O.R. methodology can prove very valuable to new recruits as they seek to establish themselves on the fast track up the corporate ladder. Our experience suggests that the O.R. course will receive lots of strong support for recent graduates if it provides students with great Excel skills, particularly the use of those extremely useful Excel functions (such as =SUMPRODUCT(), =RAND(), =VLOOKUP(), Goal Seeking, Solver, Data Tables and that Data Analysis tool pack functions) that most people don't know about but that we use regularly in O.R. modeling.

5. Show that O.R. tools can aid decision-making in large and small corporations, the public sector and even personal life. A great strength of O.R. is its widespread applicability. O.R. can contribute to large or small businesses, to public sector and to personal decision-making. Showcasing all of these through examples, applications, projects or cases will make the point that every student can benefit from paying attention to the material of the O.R. course.

6. Teach a few topics really well rather than many topics in a rush. There is a temptation to include everything in a course, but I think this is a big mistake. Students may not remember anything. If you teach a few topics really well with examples, cases, projects, Interfaces readings, etc. for each topic, then students will remember these topics. They may actually know how to use the tools covered and have the time to develop the required skills to perform useful work on the job.

7. Teach a business course first and an O.R. course second. Business schools teach business. Students going to business school are planning a career in business and want to learn about business including finance, marketing, human resources, environmental analysis, information systems and strategy, as well as the management of production and operations. Many O.R. courses in business programs appear to be a lot of O.R. and rather little business, and in particular lots of coverage of production and operations problems and very little about anything else.

Students learn about business by being exposed to real world problems set in recognizable companies involving executives they may read about in the newspapers. Materials like this can be included in a course using Edelman Prize finalist papers, projects done in real companies or cases. I know that Edelman Prize finalist papers, or other articles from Interfaces, are used in many O.R. courses. These applications demonstrate the value of O.R. in major organizations and provide detailed information on the solution procedures used. Projects are probably the best way to give students real-world experience but can be difficult to administer and are often time consuming (you can usually include at most one project in a course.)

Cases provide an easy way of demonstrating that our materials are really useful, can be easily applied in many real business situations and provide substantial payback to those managers who know how to do this. You can include lots of cases in a course exposing students to a variety of real companies and problems, and there is usually no "solution" in the case; in fact, for most cases (as in life) a variety of solutions are plausible.

O.R. professors constantly tell me that there are no, or few or not enough O.R. cases, but my colleagues here at Ivey and I have no trouble finding 30 to 40 great cases to use in our O.R. core courses every year. Every year we leave out a significant number of cases that we would like to include.

There is also an O.R. business out there. There are listed companies that are O.R.-based (ILOG, AZPN, ITWO, FIC to name a few) and there have been a host of recent takeovers (including MANU by JDAS, RETK and ProfitLogic by ORCL, the SABRE story from AMR to Silver Lake/TPG). Including some background on the O.R. industry adds interest for students heading for careers in finance and banking, and also demonstrates that this is an exciting field of business. Stories such as the recent takeover of Logic Tools by ILOG perk the interest of budding entrepreneurs in starting up an O.R. company.

8. Teach a highly interactive course. A key success factor in delivering a great course is to keep the students engaged in the classroom activities. This has become more difficult as the Internet and computer games have become available to students during the class. A great lecturer can engage students for perhaps 20 minutes, maybe 30 if the lecturer is truly outstanding, but most of us are not outstanding lecturers. Classes longer than 20 or 30 minutes require a different approach. Breakout groups (where the class breaks up into small groups to discuss an issue or work on a problem), "buzz groups" (where students remain in the classroom but discuss or work with one or two students sitting nearby), short student presentations (either pre-planned or cold) and case discussion (where students contribute live in the classroom) are all proven methods to improve students' involvement in the learning process. Using some of these ideas to keep students engaged in the classroom activities will lead to more enjoyable classes for all concerned, will generate interest in the materials covered, and will lead students to rate the course more highly.

O.R. instructors are part of a profession that has recognized the need to more aggressively market itself in order to prosper or perhaps even survive. INFORMS can do some of this but its abilities and effectiveness are limited by its resources. O.R. instructors have an opportunity to help out at very little cost; if we can teach terrific O.R. courses that are highly valued by our students, then O.R. can prosper in our own schools and departments, and this will do much to secure a prosperous future for O.R. The recent history of business schools shows that it is pretty easy for O.R. courses to get cancelled, but it also shows that there have been some successes.

Teaching is a highly personal activity, and most instructors know what works for them. I hope that the above ideas will stimulate some thinking about how O.R. educators might do more to help "market the profession."



Peter C. Bell (pbell@ivey.uwo.ca) is a professor at the Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario.

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