Is a physicist who enters management a failed scientist? Are scientific and technical skills applicable to managerial and entrepreneurial jobs? Roy Johnston has been thinking about the kind of 'culture' required if the innovative spirit is to be fostered among today's science graduates.

WHERE WILL today's physics graduates be in 10 or 20 years' time, and what will they be doing? This question was addressed recently at a seminar organised jointly by the Operations Research and Management Science Society of Ireland and the Institute of Physics (Irish Branch) on: 'The Physics Graduate as an Industrial Problem-Solver'. Participants included several physics graduates who had ceased to be physicists in the specialised sense, being now engaged either in management services in large firms, or in running their own enterprises; among them was Fred Ridgway, who heads the management services unit in the Bank of Ireland.

One route into management and management services for the '50s and '60s generations of 'drop-out' science graduates was operations research, which was then fashionable among the larger firms. Operations research (OR) developed during the war: collect data, model the system, predict the performance of the new system in the environment, evaluate the options, optimise, etc.

All of this proved culturally acceptable and interesting to people with a physics background. Indeed, OR had emerged from those physicists who, during the war, had invented innovative weapons like radar, going on to predict their perfonnance and assess tactics under operational conditions, whence the term 'operations research'. By the 1960s this type of statistical data- collection and model-building had become the norm in firms such as SPS International (a US-based firm setting up in Shannon, where Fred Ridgway served his time), with OR as an accepted label.

The 1960s in Ireland saw the recognition of OR as a useful management service extended to many other firms in Ireland, including Aer Lingus and Bord na M6na. It provided a route into management for science graduates, a route successfully taken by several physics graduates who subsequently achieved eminence (David Kennedy of Aer Lingus and Maurice Foley of GPA spring to mind as examples).

Such a route towards a rewarding career in Ireland was then, and remains, important in that outside of academia, opportunities for physicists are few, and the emigration rate among physicists (and indeed among the produce of the science faculties in general) has been running at a rate possibly as high as 50 per cent for decades, an unacceptable brain-drain in a small developing country.

Is the OR route still open? The philosophy behind the organisation of the recent seminar was to explore hs possibility. To answer the foregoing question, it is necessary to pick up some of Fred Ridgway's arguments, and to complement them with those of professor Vincent MeBrierty of TCD, who addressed the seminar from the point of view of the mainstream practising physicist.

Paradigm Shift

The banks were among the last of the large organisations to adopt OR in this mode, and when Fred Ridgway went into banking the thinking was dominated by large linear-programming models for moving money around on a macro scale.

However, a new OR paradigm was beginning to emerge: 'satisficing' rather than optimising, simple models, reduced data needs, an active role for people in the satisficing process, subjective probabilities. In this environment it was possible, for example, to develop term loan rules for implementation under local autonomous management, and to predict the outcomes of rule-changes.

We turn now to the mainstream physicists' angle on this process, as elaborated at the seminar by Professor MeBrierty. His theme was basically the politics of the development of an 'enterprise culture' in a long-established university such as Trinity College: the ability to recognise an innovative concept is embedded in the scierntific training; the jump from science graduate to innovative entrepreneur is not so great as might be imagined.

The record in recent years of TCD success in attracting money for industrial R&D is reported elsewhere, and is impressive. College-based R&D in itself however is not enough: it is necessary to assemble inter-disciplinary teams to handle the follow-through of the research results into enterprise development, and to get the reward-systems right, with individual, department and college sharing appropriately.

Professor MeBrierty used the term 'knowledge systems engineering' to describe the tuning of a university system to produce a flow of knowledge-based enterprise as output. A degree of organisation and administration of the process is needed, but of the 'enabling' variety, with people who possess research results leading to marketable concepts encouraged to form their own teams and to set up spin-off campus companies.

A Time of Transition

Techstart people are likely to find themselves in a cultural 'virtual state', and to begin to feel the need for some sort of community reflecting their transitional or hybrid nature. Perhaps Operations Research, with its new paradigm, can provide a focus for the development of the intellectual environment necessary for such a community?

Dr Roy Johnston is currently president of ORMSSI, and can be contacted c/o Techne Associates, 22 Belgrave Rd, Rathmines, Dublin 6.

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Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2005