A Bridge Over Troubled Water

Entrepreneur and Innovation Exchange

International Journal of Knowledge Management, 2014

This study explores whether practitioners who hold a Ph.D. in business act as intermediaries in the transfer of academic knowledge from academia to practice. Twenty Ph.D. graduates were interviewed, and the data were subjected to deductive content analysis. It was concluded that the previous claims that academic research does not influence decision-making of industry practitioners are not fully warranted. Graduates of doctoral business programs act as knowledge-transfer intermediaries that aggregate, summarize, communicate, and implement findings reported in academic publications. Academic journals have the potential to disseminate scholarly knowledge beyond the academic world. Demand for evidence-based knowledge in the practitioner's environment determines his or her probability of applying academic knowledge. Not all academic knowledge is perceived as useful by practitioners, and limited access to academic literature is a major impediment to the application of scholarly findin...

Abstract Alasdair MacIntyre's distinction between institutions and practices helps illuminate how powerful institutional forces frame and constrain the practice of organizational research as well as the output and positioning of scholarly journals. Yet his conceptual frame is limited, not least because it is unclear whether the activity of managing is, or is not, a practice. This paper builds on MacIntyre's ideas by incorporating Aristotle's concepts of poíēsis, praxis, téchnē and phrónēsis.

Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management

When described by management practitioners, academic management research is often characterized as unconcerned with practical problems and outright dismissive of practitioners’ needs, in addition to being jargon-laden, overly mathematical, theoretical, and self-referential. That unflattering characterization is generally believed to be a product of rigor vs. relevance paradox, which is at the core of the perceived lack of practical utility of theoretical management research. More specifically, it is a reflection of systemic misalignment of (management) practitioners’ informational needs, which center on insight uniqueness as a key ‘ingredient’ of organizations’ ability to create and sustain competitive advantage, and the broadly framed goals of theoretical research, which emphasize the search for universal truths in the form of generalizations. However, the now rapidly unfolding Age of Data is creating an opportunity to bridge – and perhaps even close – the persistently unproductive...

BORDER CROSSING, 2011

Changes in the global business environment are driving changes to the way business schools deliver higher education. However, the long debated gap between academia and industry (research-practice) remains unsolved. This paper explores the integration of research-teaching activities as an alternative to overcome the sometimes conflictual relationship between research and teaching and, more importantly, as a mechanism to reduce the research-practice gap. The aim of this research is to evaluate the extent to which it is feasible to integrate research-teaching in higher education. The practical suggestions to reduce the research-teaching gap proposed by Burke and Rau (2010) are tested in this paper through action research. This research provides empirical evidence on the relationships between research, teaching and practice which could help to improve academic performance, produce better managers for industry and consequently, build a bridge between academics and practitioners.

Journal of Social Service Research, 2007

Management research often bears little resemblance to management practice. Although this researchpractice gap is widely recognized and frequently lamented, there is little discussion about how it can be bridged. We partly remedy this problem in this paper by describing our experiences with the Network for Business Sustainability. Our experiences showed that the paradoxes underlying the relationship between research and practice make bridging this gap difficult. We argue that the reason why the research-practice gap endures is that bridging it is beyond the capabilities and scope of most individuals, and we call for the creation of intermediary organizations like the Network for Business Sustainability. We close by outlining some of the activities that can be undertaken by these boundary-spanning intermediary organizations, with the hopes of better aligning management research and practice. I t is an article of faith that management research intends to inform practice. In reality, however, it is an open secret that most of what most management researchers do utterly fails to resonate with management practice. Even the captains of our Academy of Management have featured this concern prominently in their outgoing presidential addresses (

International Studies of Management & Organization, 1988

Bridging the Gap between Researcher and Practitioner My topic here is the challenges and opportunities involved in sharing the results of international research carried out in the academic community with practicing managers. It is prompted by the growing internationalization of business operations and the need for managers to make new kinds of decisions in new environments under new conditions, coupled with the growing interest by the academic community in conducting international management research. I am concerned with the degree to which some managers express the feeling of "flying blind" in their international operations, being unaware of, or unable to interpret, potentially valuable academic research that addresses some of the issues they face. This paper is in no way exhaustive; rather, it seeks to develop some suggestions for international academics and managers on the basis of a brief examination of research representing three research designs in current use: survey research, field experiments, and the multiple method approach. Research projects are used to illustrate the designs; a brief discussion of the results is presented, together with my view of their strengths and limitations from the perspective of practicing managers. An attempt is made to develop some general concepts from this review, and some suggestions for improving the relevance of international academic research for the practitioner are offered. Bridging the gap between academics and practitioners poses a challenge for both groups. A major challenge for academics is to conform to academic constraints while meeting the needs of practicing managers; a challenge for practitioners is to interpret and use the results of academic research, which may use designs that are difficult to assess and are described in unfamiliar terms in

The Institutional Development of Business Schools, 2014