ABSTRACT
Arriving at Carnegie in 1949, Simon worked (with William Cooper and George Lee Bach) to build up a promising new business school, namely the School of Industrial Administration (which later became known as the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, GSIA). Business education at that time wasn’t much oriented towards research, but Simon and colleagues wanted to be different. They wanted to do research. They wanted their research to be relevant for business leaders, while at the same time emphasizing the tools of good science (Cooper 2002). Early core courses in the program included ‘quantitative control and business’ (basically consisting of accounting and statistics) taught by Bill Cooper, a sequence of micro and macroeconomics, taught by Lee Bach, and organization theory taught by Simon. As a result of their early efforts to build up a research program at Carnegie Mellon, GSIA was picked by the Ford Foundation as one of the foremost places where the new science of behavioural economics could be developed. GISA became pioneering for the establishment of business education in the United States and must be seen as part of the Simon legacy, perhaps as important as his direct intellectual contributions (Kreps forthcoming).
