Community Operational Research (OR) and Design Thinking for the Health and Social Services: A Comparative Analysis

This short paper provides a comparative analysis of community operational research (COR) and design thinking (DT) in the health and social services, from the perspective of cogenerative learning between citizens, theory, and practice domains. Although COR and DT developed out of ‘hard’ operational research/management science (OR/MS), they are fundamentally different in their purpose, grounding, and historical-conceptual trajectories. COR needs a framework to challenge its pluralism, while DT’s value as pedagogical concept, than methodology, is well worth revisiting in the spirit of the engineers who introduced OR/MS and systems science principles into contexts since displaced. There is potential alignment of COR and DT through a framework of analysis for meaning construction.