Introduction to the Special Issue on Practice-Focused Research

Abstract

When Steve Graves first approached us with the idea of serving as guest editors-in-chief for a special issue on practice-focused research, the appeal of this idea was immediate. We were very excited by this opportunity to highlight and promote the crucial role practice-focused research fulfills in our profession, and in society as a whole. At its core operations management (OM) concerns making life better: reducing waste, doing more with less, delivering services that meet people’s needs, and answering fundamental questions about how our society, and the business and service constructs we have created, operate. The papers in this special issue provide excellent examples of all of these characteristics. As we, and Steve, discuss in the forum piece at the start of the special issue, “Practice-Based Research in Operations Management: What It Is, Why Do It, Related Challenges, and How to Overcome Them” (Gallien et al. 2016), there are different strategies OM researchers can use to guide their research activities. Sometimes an OM researcher attains results through the use of mathematical constructs, which have the benefit of great generality and flexibility due to their abstraction of reality. Unfortunately, research of this type may be too abstract, and thus demonstrate limited validity in practice. Other times an OM researcher may directly address an extant problem in industry or society. One potential drawback of this latter research strategy is that such work may be too specific, limited in its application to the idiosyncratic problem context, and possibly other very closely related settings. What we sought for this special issue were those select few papers that captured the best of both of these streams of research; this coupling of generality born from abstraction and validity born from application became the defining principle we embraced about practice-based research. This principle is common to all of the papers in the special issue: They both utilize analytical sophistication to develop general insights and results, and yet also are able to establish their validity and relevance to practice. This is done through an application that yields verifiable and quantifiable results, or through an examination of a business phenomenon that again yields verifiable and quantifiable insights. We are very pleased to be able to present to you a set of nine papers that exemplify these goals, spanning a variety of industry sectors. The first three papers address novel manifestations of classical OM concerns, all within the swiftly evolving technology sector. The first of these, “Optimization in Online Content Recommendation Services: Beyond Click-Through Rates” by Besbes et al. (2016), addresses the fundamental question of which products to offer to customers. But when evaluating the products they can choose from—content recommendation (links) at the end of Web pages—they recognize the need to consider not only whether the product will be appealing to the customer, i.e., whether the content will entice the reader to click on it (“clickability”) but also whether the product will be likely to entice the reader to consume a subsequent product, i.e., whether it is likely the reader will click from it to yet another article (“engageability”). The authors show that by combining these two concepts the algorithm they develop can arrive at superior recommendations. This paper provides an admirable combination of analytical work deriving and then demonstrating the near-optimality of their algorithm, and validation work in a controlled pilot with their industry partner, Outbrain, illustrating when consideration of engageability can be most valuable. The second paper within this set, “Proactive Customer Education, Customer Retention, and Demand