樱桃导航

• Meaningful research addresses genuine, real-world challenges rather than theoretical puzzles, ultimately changing how diverse audiences think and act.
• Research without stakeholder engagement remains largely unread and fails to attract institutional talent or generate collaborative opportunities beyond publications.
• Business schools must develop better assessment methods, transcending conventional metrics, to assess research influence that cannot be easily recorded.

Transcript

Jonathan Doh: [00:13] How should we define research impact in the context of business schools?

[00:18] I think the priority is to make sure we're tackling a real-world problem, something that actually exists and is meaningful to explore and discover.

[00:27] You'd think this would go without saying, but some academic research unfortunately focuses on a kind of narrow theoretical puzzle rather than something highly relevant to the real world.

Sharon Alvarez: [00:37] Really meaningful impact is that my research has changed the way people think, whether it's among scholars, the community, or practitioners.

[00:48] Have I been able to change how people think through the work that I've put together?

The priority is to make sure we're tackling a real-world problem.

Andrew Crisp: [00:53] I think in terms of research impact, the real key is engagement.

[00:58] We did some work for an institution, and they told us a little joke about some research papers that academics had written.

[01:07] They said only five people ever read these papers: the person who wrote them, the two PhDs who helped write them, the person who reviewed them, and the mother of the person who wrote the paper, who read the first paragraph and then said, 'Very well done.' And that was the end of the matter.

[01:22] So, if you don't have that engagement, the impact is very limited. Yes, it might help with publication in the journal, which and turn helps with rankings and all those sorts of things, but in terms of attracting people to the institution, to engage, and to other projects, it's just not happening.

We really need a better understanding of what influence is, and more importantly, how to use that metric to ultimately assess impact.

[01:42] Finding a way to communicate what's there and the value it holds is incredibly important.

Peter Bamberger: [01:49] Impact has typically been defined in terms of some sort of recordable influence.

[01:57] And the problem with that for business schools is that influence then has to be translated into a payoff structure, which means it has to be put in a system that allows for comparison, which means metrics.

[02:15] But not everything that we can count has that kind of influence. There's a lot of stuff that we can't count that does have that influence, and hence that definition becomes problematic.

[02:25] And therefore, we really need a better understanding of what influence is, and even more importantly, how to use that kind of metric to ultimately assess impact.