404 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2004

Reflections on the Evolution of the FieldRichard S. Rosenbloom

Abstract—This paper offers the author’s personal reflections onthe past 50 years of research in engineering management. I sug-gest that the most important development in this field has been thecontinuing broadening of the relevant bodies of knowledge and theincreased attention paid by scholars in the pertinent social scienceand systems disciplines to issues involving technology and its man-agement. The paper concludes with a brief speculation on the fu-ture of the field.

Index Terms—Engineering management, scholarship, techno-logical innovation.

I. INTRODUCTION

THE Editor-in-Chief invited authors to offer “comments onthe past 50 years of research and practice in engineering

management” and to identify “some of the most important de-velopments in the field.”1 Responses to this charge must contendwith the fact that the definition of the field of Engineering Man-agement has been evolving and can be interpreted variously. Anarrow, literal interpretation would limit the field to knowledgeabout the management of engineering organizations, programs,and projects, and to tools for improvement of practice. The spon-sors of this TRANSACTIONS do not accept that narrow definition.Their statement of the journal’s field of interest and the natureof the seven editorial departments implicitly define “engineeringmanagement” to include an array of bodies of knowledge usefulto individuals and organizations engaged in the practice of tech-nological innovation and the conduct of research and develop-ment. My own way of phrasing this broader definition is thatthe field comprises multiple disciplines of scholarship bearingon the management of, and policy for, the creation and develop-ment of new technology and the introduction of innovations inits use.

II. ORIGINS AND EVOLUTION OF THE FIELD

In my opinion, the most important development in this fieldin the last half-century has been the continuous broadening ofthe set of relevant bodies of knowledge and the increased atten-tion paid by scholars in the pertinent disciplines to issues in-volving technology. A half-century ago, with few exceptions,scholarship in the social science disciplines seldom directly ad-dressed issues of the management of technology. The systems

Manuscript received July 15, 2004. Submission of this manuscript was invitedby Editor-in-Chief, Dr. George F. Farris.

The author is with the Graduate School of Business, Harvard University,Boston, MA 02163 USA (e-mail: rrosenbloom@hbs.edu).

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TEM.2004.836364

1It seems appropriate to describe my perspective (I could say biases) on thesubject. My contributions to this TRANSACTIONS were published early in its life,in Volumes 11 and 15. While I have continued to work within the broad field,I have chosen other audience. My focus has remained on strategic and policyissues dealing with management of technology and innovation.

sciences were just being born. Consequently, when this journalwas founded, there was little practical difference between thenarrow and the broad definitions of its subject mentioned above.

At that time, Engineering Management first began to emergeas a field within engineering schools, with Northwestern’s In-dustrial Engineering Department playing a prominent role asthe editorial locus for this journal. In the first decades of publi-cation of the journal, however, scholars in a range of social sci-ence disciplines and management fields turned their attention totechnology and innovation, radically changing the intellectualcontext of the field.

By the mid-1970s, when volume 20 of this journal wasin print, a comprehensive review of current knowledge ontechnological innovation included a bibliography of some 800writings in the disciplines of economics, sociology, and history,and in several fields of management study [1].2 Almost allof those works had been published after this journal wasfounded. The review offered an expansive (and apt) definition:“Technological innovation is an ecological process that spansa range of activities from the initial idea through development,production, and diffusion. It is a complex response to eitherneed or opportunity, requiring creativity and resulting in theintroduction of novelty.”3

Both the intellectual climate of the time and major devel-opments on the industrial scene gave strong impetus to thegrowth of broad academic engagement in the field. The erawas characterized by a belief in the power of science andan awareness of the paucity of knowledge about the waysin which new science was translated into new technology. Asmall number of high-profile innovations had an enormousinfluence on awareness of the potential value of science-basedinnovation. The tales of wartime military innovations by sci-entists and engineers in MIT’s Radiation Laboratory and inthe Manhattan Project and of the development of Nylon—ahuge commercial success—from scientific research at DuPont,affected decision-makers and scholars in a wide range of fields.Vannevar Bush’s enormously influential book, Science: TheEndless Frontier, fueled the belief that more was yet to come[2].

During the same period, the management of technologybegan to attract attention in schools of management. The arrivalof James Bright at the Harvard Business School and DonaldMarquis at MIT’s Sloan School in the late 1950s marked theemergence of the first faculty groups focused on technological

2Essays in the volume surveying pertinent work in economics, sociology,and history were written by such luminaries as Simon Kuznets, EdwinMansfield, Everett Rogers, Nathan Rosenberg, and Thomas Hughes, amongothers, while contributions with a managerial perspective were contributedby Albert Rubenstein and the current author.

3The review was carried out by a team based at Georgia Institute ofTechnology and funded by the National Science Foundation. The quoteddefinition, by Charles Susskind and Martha Zybkow, is on page 9.

0018-9391/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

ROSENBLOOM: REFLECTIONS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE FIELD 405

innovation within business schools. In schools of public ad-ministration, science policy became a recognized field, led atHarvard by the Dean of the school, Don Price.

It took a while for these developments in cognate fields tobegin to influence scholarship on Engineering Management. Inthose early decades, the emerging field remained inchoate andsomewhat chaotic. In the mid-1970s, Albert Rubenstein, theneditor of this journal, observed that “The field of innovation“research” is currently diverse, loose, and full of gaps and con-tradictions [3].” In its first decade, the contents of this journalwere primarily devoted to topics of academic interest to fac-ulty in engineering schools or of practical interest to engineeringmanagers. An impressionistic sampling of titles from Volumes10–12 illustrates the early attention to issues of resource allo-cation, scheduling, human resource management, and the like.4

(See Table I, left column) A similar selection of titles from themost recent issues gives some idea of the increase in the breadthand diversity of topics (Table I, right column) and the influ-ence of basic academic disciplines.5 Furthermore, fields that didnot exist 25 years ago—notably, information technology ande-commerce—are now important sources for the journal.6

In recent decades, attention to technology has grown inacademe outside of engineering schools and in journals beyondIEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT. Forexample:

• Nearly half the papers in recent volumes of this journalwere by authors based in business schools or managementdepartments and another fifth came from computer scienceor similar schools, institutes, or departments.7

• Management Science, a journal founded contemporane-ously with this one, published only one or two articles onInnovation and Technology in the 1960s, but offered morethan a dozen annually in the last five years [5].

• Relatively young multidisciplinary journals, like Re-search Policy and Industrial and Corporate Change,publish many works on management and policy for tech-nology and innovation.

• Academic meetings in the Social Sciences, such as thoseof the Business History Conference and the Society for theHistory of Technology, often include sessions pertinent tothe management of technology.

These changes in the context of the field—the expansionand diversification of disciplinary perspectives on issues; theincreasing share of contributions to relevant knowledge comingfrom scholars outside of science and engineering; and the emer-gence of competing vehicles for the dissemination of theoriesand findings—represent challenges to the journal. Whether thegoverning definition of the field and the basic paradigms ofknowledge about the field have adapted sufficiently to thesechanges are questions that might be considered further.

4I was unable to locate copies of the very first volumes of the journal.5One other difference of possible interest is the 70% increase in the average

number of words per title (along with a slight increase in the length of wordsemployed).

6The concept of an information technology industry is relatively recent. Theearliest citation of the phrase “information technology industry” in the Lexis-Nexis data base is from 1982 [4].

7Based on a sample of articles in Volumes 50 and 51.

TABLE IVOLUMES 10–12 RECENT VOLUMES

III. THE FUTURE

The editor’s charge included an invitation to speculate on thefuture of the field and of the journal, certainly a risky task. I will

406 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 51, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2004

venture to say that changes during the next decades are unlikelyto resemble those of the past. The study of technology withinsocial science disciplines and in the various schools of admin-istration has reached a certain maturity; the age dominated byinformation technology is already here; on-going change in theacademy will involve the deepening and maturing of these fieldsrather than the creation of wholly new ones. Hence, instead ofstriving to adapt to the proliferation of new fields relevant to en-gineering management, scholars will need to seek frameworksand concepts that integrate more successfully the tools and con-cepts of the various relevant fields in order to apply them toissues of engineering management.

REFERENCES

[1] P. Kelly and M. Kranzberg, Eds., Technological Innovation: A CriticalReview of Current Knowledge. San Francisco, CA: San FranciscoPress, 1978.

[2] United States Office of Scientific Research and Development, “Science,The Endless Frontier,” U.S. Govt. Printing Office, Washington, DC, Areport to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Sci-entific Research and Development, July 1945.

[3] P. Kelly and M. Kranzberg, Op. Cit., p. 231.

[4] J. Crisp, Re-Cabling Britain. London, U.K.: Financial Times, Dec. 4,1982, sec. I, p. 20.

[5] S. A. Shane and K. T. Ulrich, “Technological innovation, product devel-opment, and entrepreneurship in management science,” Manage. Sci.,vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 133–144, 2004.

Richard S. Rosenbloom was educated at HarvardCollege and Harvard Business School, Boston, MA,where he taught courses on manufacturing man-agement, technological innovation, and competitivestrategy from 1958 to 1997.

He is the David Sarnoff Professor of Business Ad-ministration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.He served at various times in the administration ofthe School as Director of the Doctoral program, As-sociate Dean for Research and Course Development,and Chairman of Baker Library. He was co-editor of

and contributor to Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End ofan Era (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). He is an author oreditor of 15 other books and more than 30 articles on manufacturing and tech-nology management. He has served as a Director of nine public companies inthe U.S., U.K., and Israel. His current research deals with the management ofcorporate research and the strategic uses of innovative technology.