Abstract
In the past several decades, the operations management community has developed a substantial base of analytic and empirical research for understanding and helping implement manufacturing practices such as lean, six sigma and agile manufacturing. However, the American economy is in the midst of a profound industrial transformation, which is shifting the role of the domestic manufacturing sector away from direct production and toward new product innovation and supply chain coordination. The "white collar" activities involved in these functions differ in fundamental ways from the "blue collar" activities involved in manufacturing. In this talk, we discuss some of the implications of these differences for the extendability of the traditional OM research paradigm to these "white collar" systems. Then, as a step toward modeling and understanding the operations of the innovation process, we present some original empirical research into the role of collaboration in two separate environments - academic publishing in American engineering schools and new vehicle development at a large auto manufacturer.