Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit AbstractThe business school management science course is suffering serious decline.The traditional model-and algorithm-based course fails to meet the needs of MBA programs and students.

Student consulting projects require students to apply OR/MS tools to obtain insight into the activities of firms in the community. These projects benefit faculty by providing clear feedback on the real capabilities of students, a broad connection to local industry, and material for case studies and research. They benefit companies by stimulating new thinking regarding their activities and delivering results they can use. Projects provide insights into the end-user modeling mode of OR/MS practice. Projects support continuous improvement as the lessons gained from a crop of projects enable better teaching during the next course offering, which in turn leads to better projects and further insights into teaching.

There is a great need for creativity within the MS/OR environment. Managers must be capable of defining problems, developing novel solutions, and implementing them effectively. A lot of research has focused on creativity. Researchers, for example, discussed methods of improving creative thinking in people, presented techniques that can encourage participants to develop more novel ideas, described the creative problem-solving process. I focus on creative problem-solving (CPS) techniques and how best to choose the most appropriate for a given situation. To this end, therefore, I have categorized the techniques and placed them in a continuum ranging from paradigm-preserving techniques to paradigm-breaking techniques.

Process-driven spreadsheet queuing simulation is a better vehicle for understanding queue behavior than queuing theory or dedicated simulation software. Spreadsheet queuing simulation has many pedagogical benefits in a business school end-user modeling course, including developing students' intuition, giving them experience with active modeling skills, and providing access to tools. Spreadsheet queuing simulations are surprisingly easy to program, even for queues with balking and reneging. The ease of prototyping in spreadsheets invites thoughtless design, so careful spreadsheet programming practice is important. Spreadsheet queuing simulation is inferior to dedicated simulation software for analyzing queues but is more likely to be available to managers and students.

L ogistics optimization has significantly grown in popularity over the last few decades. Improvements in computing power, modeling software, and the willingness of companies to invest time in the modeling effort have allowed models that were once too unwieldy to solve to optimality to be solved quickly. This has led to a more wide-spread recognition by logistics managers of the potential advantages of using optimization. The scope of logistics optimization in companies and organizations has expanded to address strategic, tactical, operational, and collaborative decision making. Spreadsheets, an analytical tool familiar to managers, have played a crucial role in the expanded modeling efforts of companies. Although optimization's role in logistics has grown tremendously, there still are areas that remain to be explored that will allow it to achieve an even larger and more successful role in the management of companies. Additionally, there are some models that are still too large or too complex to currently solve to optimality, despite the advances in computing power and modeling ⁄ solving software.