A car has 30,000 parts. A nuclear reactor has hundreds of thousands of parts. The Boeing 777 has 4 million parts. What technical, human and managerial skills does it take to design, engineer, manufacture and safely operate such complex systems? This is the question that motivates Ravi Madhavan, professor of business administration in the School of Business.
Much of scientific research is focused on discovery, which usually means asking progressively narrower questions. But to understand complex capabilities, Madhavan believes that a more comprehensive approach is needed because the roots of such capabilities are not only inside a company building a system but in society more broadly. The problems are not just technological but also managerial and regulatory, requiring an integrated, multidisciplinary approach.
“For some questions, it is best to actually go out into the field and talk with people to understand how managers do things,” says Madhavan.
While his journal-focused scholarship examines networks and alliances between companies, his fieldwork elaborates what he calls “a socio-cognitive theory of complex capabilities,” an explanation of how people and organizations operate in complex systems. Following more than a decade of fieldwork in China in the nuclear energy and commercial aircraft sectors, he has published and presented his work widely and is now working on a book.
He got a chance to observe the growth of the nuclear power industry in China closely beginning in the mid-2000s, when the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Company LLC approached the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business with a strategy problem.
Westinghouse called on the Katz School’s consulting field projects, in which teams of MBA students work on consulting projects for outside companies. As luck would have it, Madhavan was the faculty supervisor and traveled with the students to Westinghouse’s operation in China, where they interviewed Westinghouse people and their Chinese counterparts.
Madhavan continued to visit China over the next several years, along with faculty colleagues from the Departments of Economics and Political Science and the Swanson School of Engineering.
“I’ve had the opportunity to watch this industry change and shift. Today, China is the leader in reactor building and a formidable competitor in nuclear energy exports,” he points out.
“Learning to keep the edge in high-value advanced industries like nuclear energy, space systems and the electrical grid is a ‘whole of society’ endeavor,” Madhavan says. “Understanding complex capabilities is crucial.”