Emerging trends and new frontiers in community operational research

Community Operational Research (Community OR), and its disciplinary relation, Community-Based Operations Research, has an increasingly high profile within multiple domains that benefit from empirical and analytical approaches to problem solving. These domains are primarily concentrated within nonprofit services and local development. However, there are many other disciplines and application areas for which novel applications and extensions of Community OR could generate valuable insights. This paper identifies a number of these, distinguishing between 'emerging trends' (mostly in well-studied areas of operational research, management science and analytics) and 'new frontiers', which can be found in traditions not commonly oriented towards empirical and analytical methods for problem solving, where community-engaged decision modeling represents new ways of generating knowledge, policies and prescriptions. This paper will show how the exploration of emerging trends and new frontiers in Community OR can provide a basis for the development of innovative research agendas that can broaden the scope and impact of the decision sciences.