Communication Partnerships

Alfred Marshall

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr.

The Center for Industry Studies promotes scholarly research that is informed by the practical experience of industry in order to advance economics and other academic disciplines, and to enhance their impact on industry and on the community. In this way, we seek to provide educational opportunities for our students and to use scholarship as a vehicle for helping students gain access to professional opportunities. Through research and education we seek to enhance the well-being of our community and to further its economic development.

Follow the links on the left to find out more about what we do, our vision for the future, and the experience and research that shaped our past.

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Communication between academic research activities and business firms can lead to partnerships that encourage educational opportunities and economic advancement. For students, the results can involve exposure to competitive problems at the cutting edge of economic change. For firms, the results can be the solidification of competitive advantage in a dynamic environment. For communities, the results can lead to a basis for knowledge that will support economic development. After a decade of steel industry research and collaboration, faculty members who lead research in the Center for Industry Studies have established the Center's credibility and demonstrated its potential. The Center builds on this experience to encourage research on a broad range of industries...from the well-established to the newly emerging, from manufacturing to services. Through scholarship we seek benefits in education, competitiveness, and regional economic development.

The basis of modern economics as an academic discipline—much of the substance of the textbooks that inform first-year students—was shaped by intellectual leaders, like Alfred Marshall, who believed that the scientific foundation of economics and its social impact are enhanced by grounding analysis in the practical experience of industry:

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Alfred Marshall
Cambridge, England
1919

In 1903, Marshall established the Economics Tripos as an independent course of study at Cambridge University, England. His career began in the mid-19th century and spanned a period of more than fifty years. The importance of his theoretical contributions is evidenced by the fact that a very substantial amount of the course content for introductory economics today relies on Marshall's work.

In the preface to one of his last publications, Industry and Trade (1919), Marshall explains that he had a career-long practice of visiting manufacturing plants so that he might be better informed by the experience. This practice was motivated by the belief that his scholarly contributions would be more meaningful because of the knowledge gained in those plant visits.

Arthur Pigou, Marshall's student and successor as Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, confirmed this idea. Reflecting in his Memorials of Alfred Marshall, Pigou explains "What he [Marshall] aimed at in all of this was to get, as it were, the direct feel of the economic world, something more intimate than can be obtained from merely reading descriptions, something that should enable one, with sure instinct, to set things in their true scale of importance, and not to put in the forefront something that is really secondary merely because it presents a curious problem for analysis."

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This powerful principle for scholarly research was reconfirmed in 1990 when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation established the first of its Sloan Industry Centers. Each of the Sloan Industry Centers focuses on a specific industry, and is committed to building partnerships that permit direct contact between faculty members and firms in the industry so that academic research can be well informed. In this way, the Sloan Foundation hopes to promote academic research that has broad impact. Research in these research centers has grown to include studies across a large number of industries in the manufacturing and service sectors.

One of the first Sloan Industry Centers was organized jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and was focused on research concerning the steel industry. In part because of achievements of the Sloan Steel Industry Center, an anonymous donor made a major gift to the University of Pittsburgh in order to help endow the Center for Industry Studies.

The Center for Industry Studies, which was established in 2001, embraces the principles of research that are embodied in Sloan Industry Centers, and has been formally granted the status of an Affiliate of the Sloan Industry Centers Program. Unlike the traditional Sloan Industry Centers, research in Pitt's Center for Industry Studies is not limited to a single industry, but will span a broad range of industries. Moreover, the Center for Industry Studies extends its underlying principles for research across the traditional boundaries that are drawn by academic disciplines.

The Center for Industry Studies also owes its existence to the intellectual legacy of Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr. (1941-1999). As a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, Ahlbrandt was Co-Principal Investigator (with the late Professor Richard Cyert of Carnegie Mellon University) at the founding of the Sloan Steel Industry Center.

Over the course of their careers, Ahlbrandt and Frank Giarratani, founding Director of the Center for Industry Studies, shaped a set of core values related to their academic research. Their vision, jointly developed and mutually held, was that academic research can further scholarly disciplines while it helps to create educational opportunities for students and promote economic development. The concept of the Center for Industry Studies was borne in the collaboration that Ahlbrandt and Giarratani enjoyed over a period of twenty years. The faculty members and students who comprise the Center for Industry Studies owe a debt of gratitude to Ahlbrandt, and a share of any beneficial impact that our work may have on our community should be recognized as part of Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr.'s legacy.

Our respect for Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr. is measured in many ways, but we hope that it will soon be measured by naming the Center for Industry Studies in his honor. A generous donation made by Mr. Thomas C. Graham counts as the first step toward the ultimate goal of $500,000, which will secure Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr.'s name for this research center.

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