Introducing students to community operations research by using a city neighborhood as a living laboratory

This paper describes a course taught in the Collete of Business and Administration at Drexel University in which students undertake real-world projects in an inner-city neighborhood. The course is an elective for students who have been exposed to the traditional techniques for problem solving in such courses as management science, operational research, statistics, organizational behavior, marketing, and economics. They address such public sector problems as people moving, traffic flow, trash removal, market promotion, and surveys. Typically, the students discover that these problems are complex and have many stakeholders with competing interests, so that they do not fit neatly into one of the problem types encountered in traditional course work. Thus, the students are encouraged to bring to bear a variety of traditional and nontraditional techniques from many disciplines. The work on large-scale problems is pursued in directed project teams that simultaneously offer the students a unique learning experience and real service to the community.