Connecting Business School Research to Society

• Citation counts and journal rankings capture academic reach but often leave the broader societal relevance of business school research unseen.
• Promotion and funding decisions are being reexamined, as business schools rethink how research that shapes government and societal change gets rewarded.
• A new framework built on “productive interactions” gives researchers a shared language to document and communicate their work’s impact.

Transcript

Tracy Taylor: [00:12] In business schools, we are starting to have a really intense conversation about research impact being more than scholarly research impact. And that’s because I think there’s a general questioning in a lot of our communities about the social license of universities and business schools.

[00:30] Instead of just thinking of research as for the academic community, we’re starting to think more about how our research impacts society, how it’s relevant, and how that relevance addresses big societal problems.

[00:49] Traditional metrics for measuring research impact within universities tend to rely on the scholarship associated with that research.

[01:04] What I mean is they measure which journal you publish in, and who within the academic community references that research and uses it in their research or subsequent articles. So, it’s limited because it’s actually mainly universities talking to universities. We’re not talking to the external world.

Culture needs to change in how we recognize our researchers who are doing work ... to create that societal impact.

[01:29] Business schools often reward people based on their research metrics. Those metrics do not capture societal impact or the work our researchers are doing to change how government organizations and society address some of those big societal issues.

[01:53] So, culture needs to change in how we recognize—through performance measures, resourcing, and rewarding—our researchers who are doing work through and with our communities to create that societal impact.

[02:11] The Australian Business Dean’s Council felt there was an imperative to address whether our research addresses the big questions in society and how we communicate that.

[02:26] And so, we embarked on a two-year project where we, as good academics, looked at the literature on societal impact and found that most of the theoretical models around attribution- or contribution-based theories didn’t fully explain or identify how societal impact was being created in business school research.

[02:55] We developed the term “productive interactions” to reflect how the scholars interacted with the end users. Through a series of activities back and forth, which were equally valued in scholarship and by the end users, that they create through those interactions, knowledge that can be applied to create change.

The next step ... is developing tools to help business schools better disseminate and use the framework.

[03:25] We developed a framework to enable our scholars and researchers to capture evidence of productive interactions with the community, organizations, and government, and to map those interactions and their intensity.

[03:48] The journey is captured through the framework, and it allows researchers to then co-create stories and narratives to then disseminate more broadly as impact cases.

[04:06] The framework can provide not only scholars with a tool to use, but also people within business schools who are their line managers or deans, so that it can be acknowledged as a worthwhile and rewarded activity for academics or faculty in business schools.

[04:31] Currently, in the white paper, we’ve outlined how we arrived at the framework and included case studies of societal impact generated by different universities and researchers in our business schools in Australia and New Zealand.

[04:50] The next step we’re working on now is developing tools to help business schools better disseminate and use the framework.