CSCMP -Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals -is getting global. So to are practitioners and academicians doing their best to follow this trend. Academic conferences and journals continue to grow in terms of participants and contributions from most parts of the world. CSCMP has always supported the efforts of logistics and SCM academicians to be globally oriented. This support has, for example, materialized in the establishment of what is known as the European Research Seminar (ERS), held in connection with the second European CSCMP conference that took place in Brussels in May 2006. In this seminar, several pieces of research were presented to audiences representing academicians and practitioners. In addition to very good presentations, there were lively discussions and many questions asked to the presenters. From these presentations and after several rounds of triple-blind peer reviews, four papers were selected for this special section.
These four articles of course can only provide you with a brief overview of what is going on in logistics and SCM in Europe. Firstly, four papers are not sufficient to cover all the "hot" topics and issues that take place in this part of the world. Secondly, Europe consists of many diverse countries and cultures. Logistics-wise, this is often seen as an obstacle, but we hope that this initiative may contribute to the anticipation of such diversity as richness rather than hindrance. It is, of course, impossible to say whether this and other initiatives will enhance logistics and supply chain innovation. It might happen in the long run! Supply chain risk is becoming an important topic in our globalized world that experiences all kinds of political and natural risks. McKinnon presents in his article, Life without trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy, an interesting but also highly mind-widening analysis of the impact of a paralysis of the road freight system in the UK. As known by most of the people working with logistics, Europe is highly congested and our national, hence supra-national (EU) bodies are allocating a good deal of resources in solving this problem. For example, trucks are not a popular form of transportation on the busy roads, and yet there are not many people who are seriously thinking about the impact of this freight system on the economy as a whole as well as the daily welfare of the European inhabitants. In his analysis, McKinnon reveals