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Available Issues

April 10, 2013 - May 13, 2026

Available Issues

April 10, 2013 - May 13, 2026

OM Grand Challenges: Call for Proposals for the 2026 MSOM Conference and M&SOM Special Issue

Editors-in-Chief: Georgia Perakis and Wedad Elmaghraby (Guest)
Department Editors: Jérémie Gallien, Pavithra Harsha, Dorothee Honhon, and Ananth Raman

The MSOM Society and the M&SOM Journal are pleased to announce a new initiative: OM Grand Challenges. This effort invites the operations management community to identify and articulate the major challenges the field should address over the next 5–10 years, organized around the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We invite proposals from teams interested in leading a grand challenge aligned with an SDG and present their work in a dedicated track at the 2026 MSOM Conference.

Proposal submissions are encouraged from teams of academics and practitioners. Each team will work collaboratively to define a set of grand challenges associated with their SDG, grounded in current practice, informed by practitioner experience, and oriented toward actionable research directions. Submissions can target an SDG (e.g., SDG 2 – Zero Hunger) or a sub-SDG (e.g., SDG 2.3).

The initiative will culminate in a special issue of the M&SOM Journal. Authors whose proposals are accepted for presentation at the MSOM conference will automatically move toward a second review cycle in the special issue of the M&SOM Journal. The spirit of the review process follows closely the Frontiers in Operations Special Issues, i.e., review by the DE team and senior AEs.

Each invited paper for publication in M&SOM should follow a common structure parallel to the proposal: summarizing the state of academic knowledge, synthesizing practitioner insights, identifying critical grand challenges, and proposing potential approaches for addressing them.

Proposal Format

Length: Maximum 10 pages, 1-inch margins, 11-point font, at most 33 lines per page.

Basic Information

  • Selected SDG (or sub-SDG)
  • Team members (researchers and, if applicable, practitioners): names, affiliations, and relevant expertise

Required Sections

  • Current State of Practice: Overview of how the SDG is currently being addressed in industry.
  • Current State of Academic Knowledge: Summary of existing research and theoretical foundations.
  • Practitioner Engagement: List of industry, public-sector, or non-profit contacts who have been or will be interviewed or collaborators.
  • Grand Challenges: A well-justified list of key challenges related to the SDG that remain unsolved or insufficiently addressed that could be appropriately pursued by the OM community.
  • References

Submission Deadline: Proposal must be submitted to [email protected] by March 15, 2026.

Remarks

  • Selected teams will be invited to present in a special session at the 2026 MSOM Conference.
  • Submitting a proposal does not count toward the MSOM conference submission limits (one MSOM submission, one per SIG meeting, and two total presentations).
  • Notification of acceptance will be sent by May 15, 2026.

Timeline

  • March 15, 2026 – Proposal submissions due (submitted to [email protected])
  • April 15, 2026 – Authors notified of acceptance to present at MSOM 2026 and proposals sent to M&SOM journal for entry into Manuscript Central and DE/AE assignment.
  • June 15, 2026 – DE/AE reviews shared with invited authors (six-month revision window)
  • July 12, 2026 – Presentations at MSOM (Harvard), during SIG Day
  • December 15, 2026 – Final papers submissions due (~ 15 pages)

We received several questions about the announcement, so we are providing additional clarifications available here.

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