Engage with business, Professor Tima Bansal urges academics. Research should help to improve practice, not merely describe it

At a time when businesses face unprecedented challenges — from artificial intelligence to climate change to geopolitical instability — management scholars should be at the centre of corporate transformations. Instead, they remain largely absent from boardroom discussions, media coverage and strategic planning alike.

Why does a field dedicated to improving business practice continue to fall short of its purpose, even as pressures are mounting from business school accreditation bodies, peers and wider society for practical impact?

Many management scholars, including me, have dedicated our careers to understanding how organisations work through rigorous research into the drivers of performance, innovation and sustainable growth. We joined business schools believing we could influence business leaders, yet we remain largely unknown to the executives we study. Instead, they pay hefty consultancy fees rather than engage with researchers who are often more insightful and innovative.

Professor Tima Bansal

The invisibility of management scholarship reflects failures on both sides — academia and business. But as an academic insider, I am better qualified to diagnose where scholars have gone wrong. We typically blame our invisibility on academia’s warped incentive system, in which career advancement depends almost entirely on publishing in prestigious journals.

At best, following a multiyear, often tortuous and highly uncertain publication process, narrowly scoped academic articles can take longer to produce than most corporate strategic plans take to implement. Crucially, scholars must master academic prose deliberately inaccessible to practitioners, while somehow remaining relevant to the business world they study.

Further, academic culture elevates scholars who consistently publish in top-tier journals. Those who engage with practitioners are often criticised by their peers as having “sold out”, particularly if they are compensated for engaging with managers, or for lacking the ability to succeed in prestigious academic circles. The stigma that scholars face in speaking to practice is visceral.

But these structural explanations obscure a fundamental issue: management scholars often solve the problems in a way that does not resonate with business practice. We build elegant models that explain business-related performance, rather than creating tools that shape it. This fixation creates three barriers to addressing business realities.

First, we answer “why” questions when leaders need “how” solutions. Management scholars excel at explaining causality: why certain strategies succeed, organisations fail, or leaders inspire organisational actions. But executives need concrete guidance. They want frameworks for making their own transformation succeed. We offer descriptions when business demands prescriptions.

Second, we pursue abstract insights when executives need context-specific guidance. Academic models prize theory that is generalisable. But managers facing declining market share in south-east Asia do not need a theory of competitive dynamics; they want specific intelligence about their industry, their competitors and their organisational capabilities.

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Third, we analyse historical patterns while business faces unprecedented disruption. Executives grappling with AI, climate change and geopolitical upheaval find little guidance in models trained on pre-disruption data.

Management scholarship needs to embrace a fundamentally different approach to creating knowledge: co-creation. Instead of studying business from the outside, we should be building solutions from within.

This partnership must begin with defining problems together. While scholars identify research questions by surveying academic literature, practitioners do so by confronting real challenges. Bringing these perspectives together creates research that is rigorous and relevant, addressing gaps in both knowledge and practice.

The pay-off of better questions extends to better answers. Rather than producing models that merely describe organisational behaviour and strategy, co-created research generates tools that change it. We stop being organisational anthropologists and start becoming organisational architects. Instead of handing executives a blueprint of how tables are constructed, we give them the hammer to build better ones.

One example is the Embedding Project at Simon Fraser University in Canada, led by Stephanie Bertels. It has generated dozens of tools and guidance documents to help organisations embed sustainability into their operations. Researchers and executives work together to co-produce the materials. Other initiatives include the Wharton People Analytics programme and MIT Sloan’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, in the US, and Imperial’s Leonardo Centre on Business for Society, in London.

Managing the relationship between scholars and executives is not simple. Initiatives may end up favouring a research agenda over practical benefits, or tackling business problems but failing to integrate deep theoretical insights.

The goal is not to turn scholars into consultants or managers into researchers, but to harness what each does best. Managers excel at navigating immediate demands and optimising within the existing paradigm. Scholars can identify underlying mechanisms and question the paradigm. The friction between the urgency to act and the scepticism of hasty decisions generates a creative tension that can spark genuine innovation.

Scholars must remain scholars: challenging conventional wisdom, pursuing unpopular truths, thinking beyond immediate constraints. Managers must remain managers: testing ideas against reality, balancing demands, driving implementation. The distinctions must remain intact and the power be equal. The magic happens at their intersection, not in their convergence.

Tima Bansal is a professor of strategy and sustainability at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada

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Aim to explain: let academics focus on academic research and business practitioners on practice, argue professors Yehuda Baruch and Pawan Budhwar

Since its inception, the role of academia has been to generate and disseminate knowledge, not to apply it. Business schools’ academics are there to conduct research, make academic contributions, teach and educate. Implementation is for industry, governments and other bodies.

More recently, governments and funding bodies have set new expectations that go against these basic principles, in particular challenging academic freedom. This is an attempt to re-engineer the profession by making “impact” a defining criterion for judging the research output of business schools.

Professor Yehuda Baruch

We strongly oppose this idea. Knowledge creation and dissemination must always be the essential goal of business school research. While implementation is certainly valuable, it cannot be the defining yardstick, rather a “nice thing to have”. Just as we do not expect business managers to conduct research and educate students, academics should not be expected to be practitioners. As one of us told his dean: “If I wanted to have an ‘impact’, I would opt to be a consultant.”

One possible reason is logical. “Division of labour” is an efficient organising principle, and should apply not merely within the workplace, but also across professions. The principal role of academics is to produce knowledge, not to apply it. Academics should be enablers, catalysts of change, not the actual change executors. Knowledge can and should lead to practical outcomes, but it is distinct from “action”. It is unsurprising that academics struggle to contribute to specific, practical and tangible outcomes — either for customers and industry clients, or for policymakers.

Conducting research, developing insights and publishing papers and books that could directly or indirectly inspire managers and policymakers is a desired outcome. But having a practical impact is not the main purpose of academic inquiry or their choice of career.

The apparent conflict between rigour and relevance in knowledge creation is misleading. Academic rigour is critical for knowledge creation, while relevance leads to outcomes. When Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity, he had no involvement with or intention to have an impact on industry. The fact that his theory had tremendous impact on humanity, both positive and negative, is irrelevant for his role as a scholar.

A second reason is practicality. There are no clear, valid and reliable measures of “impact” for the social sciences. Impact can be direct and indirect. Academic knowledge in business and management typically leads to indirect impact. There is a major distinction between primary and secondary impact, and the latter is difficult to validate.

It is also very difficult to identify whether a specific publication or stream of work has generated a change. Impact in management research can rarely be attributed to the work of a single individual or a single team.

It takes numerous studies and accumulated knowledge to generate changes in industry — and these changes often take many years to materialise, unlike vocational areas such as engineering.

A third reason is academic freedom. The moment governments begin to demand certain outputs, the basic premise of autonomy is infringed. Such an approach goes against the principle of academic freedom, which protects intellectual independence and autonomy of scholarship. External interference undermines this core value of academia.

Why do governments and funding bodies demand “impact”? One answer is “because they can”. They want to show they have influence and impact, and to leave a legacy. They also have a genuine concern about wasting resources on “unproductive” research. Even some scholars convinced by the case for impact have adjusted the fundamental character of their work accordingly.

Professor Pawan Budhwar

One concern is the way impact is measured, especially via the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. The academic needs to show that one or more organisations changed their practice or policy following a rigorous academic study. Yet both logically and practically, this does not work — and should not work.

We believe academics would do better by focusing their energies on rigorous academic research, while leaving others to take the lead role in developing practice. We do not advocate disengagement with practice. Many business schools engage the public through TED events or publishing popular books — activities which can significantly benefit society. But these activities should not prejudice the primary functions of academia.

Kurt Lewin, the social and organisational psychologist, said: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” We believe good academic ideas, concepts and theories will ultimately yield strong impact, though not always in line with their originator’s intent. Given the nature of academic work, this impact may not be immediate or direct.

Demanding “impact” is an attempt to re-engineer the profession, questioning the entire role of academia in society. If actively and aggressively pursued, the “impact agenda” presents a significant threat to academia in general — and to business schools and management science in particular.

*Yehuda Baruch is professor of management at the University of Southampton Business School while Pawan Budhwar is professor of international human resource management at *Aston Business School