Supporting Research Into Impact

• Career-long research pathways shape how scholars create knowledge and extend its relevance across diverse societal and organizational contexts.
• Later-career scholars broaden the impact of their work by applying established expertise to new sectors, for example, from healthcare to education.
• The Academy of Management is enhancing scholarly impact by translating research into practitioner-friendly formats like AOM Today and Insights.

Transcript

Peter Bamberger: [00:13] When we consider the steps business schools can take to enhance their impact, I think it's important to think about the career cycle of the individuals who create that knowledge.

[00:24] So, junior scholars have no choice but to build a reputation for themselves in terms of creating that type of knowledge. They have a limited amount of time.

[00:35] To ask a junior scholar to both create that knowledge and then translate it, and to make sure it has impact and applicability for practitioners and the various stakeholders in the community, is probably too much to ask.

[00:49] The focus should simply be on creating new knowledge, and that's what junior scholars are really good at.

[00:54] By the time scholars reach a later stage in their career—we look for reputation on the world stage in scholarship—at that point, they should probably be transforming a little bit and moving more into the area of creating impact, taking what knowledge they've created, using the evidence that they've garnered for recommendations for their findings, and starting to work to translate that into real impact and to broaden the type of impact that they've potentially been thinking about in the past.

It's important to think about the career cycle of the individuals who create that knowledge.

[01:30] If they've been thinking about one particular type of stakeholder in industry, perhaps seeing how they can use some of those findings, some of that knowledge that they've created for a broader set of stakeholders.

[01:41] For example, how might we be able to use findings regarding operations and enhancing productivity and efficiency that we see in the industry to enhance health systems?

[01:53] How might we be able to enhance—if we have findings on learning in organizations, how might that translate into learning in school systems?

[02:02] We often forget about schools as organizations in the field of management, a critical resource for society. Yet our research rarely goes into that area.

[02:14] At a later career stage, we need to start thinking about what we can do to broaden the application of the knowledge we're creating. And at that point, we have time to do that. The pressure is off.

[02:25] We tend to have tenure later on, and we need to rethink how we actually use our time as scholars once the pressure is off to create that new knowledge.

We often forget about schools as organizations in the field of management, a critical resource for society.

[02:36] The Academy of Management (AOM) is doing a couple of things to help business schools, and I should say, actually, to help our members, the faculty members, address the question of impact.

[02:48] Ultimately, by helping our members, management scholars enhance their impact, we're also helping the business schools.

[02:57] And some of the things we're doing, we recognize that scholars are not necessarily the ideal people to translate their own research into language or into parameters that practitioners can understand.

[03:12] AOM has actually taken that role for them. When scholars publish in our journals, and we have a portfolio of journals, including some of the top journals in management, we obviously own that content.

[03:25] The scholars sign the copyrights over to us, and that content is impactful when translated and, of course, is of value.

[03:37] Many, many organizations place a high value on that content, whether they are consultancies or media companies. They're looking for content and evidence-based information that they can use to guide their clients.

By helping our members, management scholars enhance their impact, we're also helping the business schools.

[03:54] We are now providing it through something called AOM Today, which is a newsfeed. We publish something called Insights, which are translations of the articles that we publish.

[04:05] Increasingly, consultancies are looking to build that into their own AI systems, allowing their clients and consultants easy access to evidence-based approaches for solving contemporary business and management problems.

[04:20] That's one of the ways, just one, that we're trying to hit this issue of impact by facilitating that type of interpretation that allows for that kind of impact to occur.

[04:31] But we're also doing it in terms of the journals, and, of course, we're working with our fellow scholarly associations to change the business of measuring, the business of metrics of impact, which needs to be changed.

[04:45] It's a multi-million-dollar, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, of business each year that can't be run like a business.

[04:56] We need to make a change. We need to bring it back to the scholars.