📈 Attracting people to OR, LSO Summer School 2025, and reimagining OR
Local Optimum: short, imperfect-yet-useful ideas - Edition #11
Welcome to a new edition of Local Optimum: a short, imperfect-yet-useful collection of ideas related to optimization, decision-making, and applied Operations Research.
Let’s dive in! 🪂
1) 🧲 Attracting people to OR
There’s a rare opportunity to bring more people into Operations Research.
Not through its name.
Not through complex algorithms.
Not through mathematical equations.
But by showing an alternative to the crowded world of Data Science and the increasing pressure on businesses to do more with less, where OR becomes a competitive advantage.
2) ☀️ LSO Summer School 2025
If you’re in India from 16th to 21st of next June, you might consider attending to this summer school on large-scale optimization:
(click on the picture to go to the page)
3) 💡 Reimagining OR
Operations Research has historical systemic issues holding back its growth.
No matter where you start, it leads back to the same place… An inevitable negative feedback loop:
Limited adoption → few case studies → poor marketing → less awareness → low demand → small market → high costs → limited tools → limited adoption…
And it has consequences we’re still facing today.
Why is that? What’s the historical context? And what are the core challenges we must overcome?
Here’s the full breakdown 👇
Are you addressing large-scale optimization problems?
Next Monday, I’ll share the second post on the 6-post series titled “Where did the time go?”.
This time, the focus will be on scalability and I’ll give ideas on how to reduce the complexity of optimization problems with different techniques.
I’ll cover:
🌪️ What large-scale problems are
💡 Ideas to help solving them
👣 First steps to take
If you tackle this kind of problems, this will be useful. See you Monday!
And that’s it for today!
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider doing any of these:
1) 🔒 Subscribe to the full version: if you aren’t already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get access to the full archive, a private chat group, and 30% off new products.
2) 🤝🏻 Collaborate with Feasible. I’m always looking for great products and services that I can recommend to subscribers. Also, if you want to write an article with me, I’m open to that! If you are interested in reaching an audience of Operations Research Engineers, you may want to do that here.
3) 📤 Share the newsletter with a friend, and earn rewards in compensation. You’re just one referral away from getting The Modern OR Engineer Playbook: Mindset, methods, and metrics to deliver Optimization that matters.
If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!
Have a nice day ahead ☀️
Borja.
