Searching for the grey swans: The next 50 years of production research

The International Journal of Production Research has successfully navigated through its first 50 years while remaining truthful to its initial editorial goals of publishing interdisciplinary work that is both relevant and rigorous. Will the journal be equally successful in the decades to come? Surely, the world has gone through huge changes and we now are part of global interconnected networks that make us vulnerable to new or at least unfamiliar phenomena. We have added expressions like black swans to our lexicon. The world has experienced both natural tsunami and business tsunami, which we term grey swans. This article describes characteristics of these grey swan business tsunami and argues that our current dominant toolkit of parsimonious analytical models may fall short of passing the test of interdisciplinary work that is both relevant and rigorous. IJPR needs to reflect upon what type of papers to encourage to keep on its original course and provides answers on how to deal with today’s grey swans.