Operations research education for forgotten populations

Typical OR education programmes are focused on those who should professionally act as ‘‘performers’’ (specialists, modellers, etc.) in the process of business problems solving through quantitative modelling and similar formalized procedures. The problem of unsatisfactory level of understanding between ‘‘specialists’’ and ‘‘generalists’’ (managers, e.g.) has been known for decades; yet we feel that at least the latter (‘‘users’’ and ‘‘sponsors’’ as their subspecies) are still not adequately educated and this fact helps the gap to survive. We discuss different views of this problem and advocate for some approaches, mainly based upon our own pedagogical experiences. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights