It has been 4.5 years since the establishment of the Design Science (DS) department in the Journal of Operations Management (JOM). Even with the recent name change to the department of Intervention-based Research (IBR), its mission remains as discussed in the initial essay (Van Aken, Chandrasekaran, & Halman, 2016, p. 1):“to publish high quality research articles that derive new theoretical and managerial insights by engaging with practice and solving complex field problems.” JOM has received over 65 DS/IBR submissions and accepted 8 of these papers on topics that include sourcing, healthcare delivery, product development, and humanitarian operations. Table 1 lists these published articles. The objective of this editorial is to share with prospective authors and reviewers the insights gained from this experience.

We first observed that the articles making it through the peer-review process to acceptance in JOM tended to deviate from common DS practices as applied in neighboring disciplines such as information systems (for an in-depth review of DS in some other disciplines, see March & Smith, 1995; Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004; Wieringa, 2014; Baskerville, Baiyere, Gregor, Hevner, & Rossie, 2018; Rai, 2017). Solutions to problems of information systems, for example, often involve a design artifact such as an algorithm or process model—a man-made solution that can then be made available more widely. Designed artifacts usually make a practical rather than a theoretical contribution. Given JOM's emphasis on theoretical contributions, we discovered that most DS articles were not a good fit with the journal. As we reflected on these published articles, we realized that the element of their contributions that benefited from being incubated in the review process was that which stemmed from the active involvement of the researchers in deploying operations management (OM) theories and tools, along the lines described by Simon (1996) in distinguishing between natural sciences and the sciences of the artificial. We thus made the decision to change the department's name to IBR to reflect this evolution in thinking at the editorial level.