Operations management researchers and practitioners face new challenges in integrating issues of sustainability with their traditional areas of interest. During the past 20 years, there has been growing pressure on businesses to pay more attention to the environmental and resource consequences of the products and services they offer and the processes they deploy. One symptom of this pressure is the movement towards triple bottom line reporting (3BL) concerning the relationship of profit, people, and the planet. The resulting challenges include integrating environmental, health, and safety concerns with green‐product design, lean and green operations, and closed‐loop supply chains. We review these and other “sustainability” themes covered in the first 50 issues of Production and Operations Management and conclude with some thoughts on future research challenges in sustainable operations management.

a b s t r a c tAlthough 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.

Please cite this article as: Roth Aleda., et al., Knowledge Creation and Dissemination in Operations and Supply-Chain Management. Production and Operations Management (2016), http://dx.doi.org/ AbstractDuring the last 25 years, the ecosystem of knowledge creation and dissemination in operations and supply-chain management has improved remarkably, and we now see ours as a vibrant community and an ecosystem in steady state. Yet, there are many opportunities ahead to revitalize our field and to expand our influence. In the spirit of continuous improvements, we propose that we focus our major efforts on accelerating the following four developments: First, having greatly expanded the domain of operations management, we should continue to expand its boundaries. Second, after a visible increase in exploratory studies, our community should accelerate our pursuit of such research. Third, we should encourage schools to develop programs to enable Ph.D. students to carry out part of their work in actual organizational settings. Fourth, we should further expand our interactions with the business community and create mechanisms to systematically disseminate some of our research to its members.

Early work in aggregate production planning has evolved into a major business process known as sales and operations planning. In the 1950s, a team led by Holt, Modigliani, Muth, and Simon, which also included Bonini and Winters, worked on aggregate production planning and forecasting and published a series of papers and a book. The literature contains reports of at least 73 applications of their work in four companies and three application studies. Holt et al.'s work and its visibility led to a renaissance of the field of operations and supply chain management as we know it today and brought two paradigm changes in the domain and the role of operations and supply chain management. First, seemingly unrelated and non-managerial individual functions started to emerge as parts of an integrated system of managing production. Second, aggregate production planning brought to forefront the central role of operations management by linking it with supply chains and other functions in the organization. #

a b s t r a c tIn a separate paper (Singhal and Singhal, 2011b), we identified two sets of opportunities for radical innovations in operations and supply-chain management (O&SCM): pursuing all phases of science and pursuing multiple perspectives. In this paper, we propose and analyze ways to accomplish this task. A network of research teams can be effective in obtaining multiple perspectives and discovering radical innovation if it conducts intensive research over an extended period. Outliers are a source of multiple perspectives and innovative ideas and can help in identifying and addressing risks. Similarly, meta-analyses and syntheses of published works can provide multiple perspectives and lead to radical innovations.