Some History of the TIMS/INFORMS College on Marketing as Related to the Development of Marketing Science

Abstract

Background At the International Meeting of The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) in Athens, Greece in the summer of 1977, it was announced that I had been elected president-elect of TIMS. It was a proud moment for me. I was to become the twenty-fifth president of an organization whose founding members included George Dantzig and Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Tjalling Koopmans, Wassily Leontief, and Herbert Simon. The list of earlier presidents of TIMS was replete with the names of distinguished scholars such as William W Cooper, Abraham Charnes, C. West Churchman, Kenneth Arrow, George Dantzig, Ronald Howard, Leonard Arnoff, Robert Thrall, Richard Cyert, and Harvey Wagner. As the successor to such a distinguished list, I came to the visceral realization that there was great opportunity to advance ideas that I deeply believed in. Although marketing was only a minor area in TIMS, its influence and role were on the increase. The TIMS College on Marketing was 10 years old, and marketing sessions at TIMS meetings were growing, along with the appearance of marketing papers in Management Science. The fact that I was the first marketing professor elected president of TIMS was of some significance symbolically with respect to the future direction of management science and of marketing (science). As fate would have it, John D. C. Little became vice-president of publications of TIMS at the same time that I became president, and the two marketing professors quickly set about making plans for initiatives that would advance management science in