This paper explores the fundamental question of why the practice and discipline of project management emerged during the 1940s through the 1960s in the United States. Although projects have been around for millennia, not until the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. military– industrial–academic complex did project management become formalized in institutional processes and as an academic discipline. The paper argues that technical complexity and novelty were the primary factors driving project management and its engineering counterpart systems engineering, as a new organizational form. Institutional factors such as the need for legal separation between government and industry created important secondary effects that drove the particular forms in which project management evolved. This paper uses examples from large scale, complex projects of the 1940s through 1960s in the aerospace and computing industries to tease out the fundamental technical and institutional factors that led to the emergence of project management in these two key American industries during this period