Management science

Management science (MS), is the broad interdisciplinary study of problem solving and decision making in human organizations, with strong links to economics, business, engineering, and other sciences. It uses various scientific research-based principles, strategies, and analytical methods including mathematical modeling, statistics and numerical algorithms to improve an organization's ability to enact rational and meaningful management decisions by arriving at optimal or near optimal solutions to complex decision problems. In short, management sciences help businesses to achieve goals using various scientific methods.

The field was initially an outgrowth of applied mathematics, where early challenges were problems relating to the optimization of systems which could be modeled linearly, i.e., determining the maxima (of profit, assembly line performance, crop yield, bandwidth, etc.) or minima (of loss, risk, costs, etc.) of some objective function. Today, management science encompasses any organizational activity for which the problem can be structured as a functional system so as to obtain a solution set with identifiable characteristics.

Management Science (journal)

Management Science is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers research on all aspects of management related to strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, information technology, and organizations as well as all functional areas of business, such as accounting, finance, marketing, and operations. It is published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences and was established in 1954 by the Institute's precursor, The Institute of Management Sciences. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has an impact factor of 2.524.

History

On December 1, 1953 at the founding meeting at Columbia University, The Institute of Management Sciences was voted into existence and William Cooper was elected as the first president. Establishment of a journal, to be called Management Science, was made the first order of business. Almost immediately after the meeting, Cooper recruited C. West Churchman to be the founding editor. Cooper, Churchman, and Abe Charnes then wrote the policy statement for the journal. Within weeks Churchman had assembled an editorial board and had the first issue ready for distribution at the first membership meeting of the institute in October 1954.