Editorial: Intervention‐based research (IBR)—What, where, and how to use it in operations management

• Author: Aravind Chandrasekaran,Suzanne Treville,Tyson Browning
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1093

EDITORIAL

Editorial: Intervention-based research (IBR)—What, where,

and how to use it in operations management

1|INTRODUCTION

It has been 4.5 years since the establishment of the

Design Science (DS) department in the Journal of Opera-

tions Management (JOM). Even with the recent name

change to the department of Intervention-based

Research (IBR), its mission remains as discussed in the

initial essay (Van Aken, Chandrasekaran, &

Halman, 2016, p. 1): “to publish high quality research

articles that derive new theoretical and managerial

insights by engaging with practice and solving complex

field problems.”JOM has received over 65 DS/IBR sub-

missions and accepted 8 of these papers on topics that

include sourcing, healthcare delivery, product develop-

ment, and humanitarian operations. Table 1 lists these

published articles. The objective of this editorial is to

share with prospective authors and reviewers the insights

gained from this experience.

We first observed that the articles making it through

the peer-review process to acceptance in JOM tended to

deviate from common DS practices as applied in neigh-

boring disciplines such as information systems (for an

in-depth review of DS in some other disciplines, see

March & Smith, 1995; Hevner, March, Park, &

Ram, 2004; Wieringa, 2014; Baskerville, Baiyere,

Gregor, Hevner, & Rossie, 2018; Rai, 2017). Solutions to

problems of information systems, for example, often

involve a design artifact such as an algorithm or process

model—a man-made solution that can then be made

available more widely. Designed artifacts usually make

a practical rather than a theoretical contribution. Given

JOM's emphasis on theoretical contributions, we discov-

ered that most DS articles were not a good fit with the

journal. As we reflected on these published articles, we

realized that the element of their contributions that

benefited from being incubated in the review process

was that which stemmed from the active involvement of

the researchers in deploying operations management

(OM) theories and tools, along the lines described by

Simon (1996) in distinguishing between natural sci-

ences and the sciences of the artificial. We thus made

the decision to change the department's name to IBR to

reflect this evolution in thinking at the editorial level.

The change was announced during the 2019 Academy

of Management meetings.

Oliva (2019) drew on Checkland's (1985) approach to

provide direction in the use of intervention as an OM

research method. Interventions are defined as the use of

a method (M) to apply a basket of theories (T) to bring a

problem situation (S)toS*. If the intervention succeeds

in moving the problem situation from Sto S*, then the

theory has been confirmed. However, a successful move

from Sto S* often requires adjustments to either Tor M.

If the adjustments are to M—as applies to a traditional

DS contribution—what is learned tends to be practical in

nature and is likely to be atheoretical. If, however, the

required adjustment concerns T, the resulting insights

about Tmay produce a theoretical contribution. We have

also witnessed occasions where what emerges is that

S*—where everyone had agreed to head—turns out to be

the wrong place to go. Answering the question “Why did

we end up in the wrong place?”also offers interesting

theoretical insights. Adding guidance to calls that

researchers step outside their ivory tower (e.g., Van de

Ven & Johnson, 2006; Van Mieghem, 2013), IBR guides

how to formalize the kind of surprise that such mixing

with practice is able to provide and how to form that sur-

prise into a theoretical contribution.

2|WHAT DID WE LEARN ABOUT

THE USE OF IBR IN OM?

To illustrate our points, we reflect on a few of the DS

papers published in JOM and explain what was interest-

ing from these works when observed through the lens

of IBR.

Consider the study by Groop et al. (2017) that set out

with the objective to improve the delivery of home

healthcare to the aging population in Finland, with S*

being an expected improvement in service for given

resources. The problem was framed along the lines of the

well-known traveling salesperson optimization that seeks

to minimize the travel time of caregivers (e.g., home

health nurses). The authors were able to convince the

review team of the reasonableness of this formulation.

DOI: 10.1002/joom.1093

370 © 2020 Association for Supply Chain Management, Inc. J Oper Manag. 2020;66:370–378.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joom