By the Numbers: The Class Of 2016

How Do You Make Business School Research More Relevant?

Remember this number: $400,000.

That’s what it costs for b-school faculty to write one scholarly article according to a Wharton study released this summer. And if you think that’s pricey, consider this: Usually only handful of academics ever read the arcane journals where this research is published. Worse yet, “publish-or-perish,” not “practice-and-appraise” is the ethos behind many programs’ tenure systems.

Sound like a big waste? That was the point made in a recent Harvard Business Review post from James C. Wetherbe and John Eckhardt, who teach at the entrepreneurship programs at Texas Tech University and the University of Wisconsin, respectively. According to the authors, “business schools have become increasingly disconnected from practice.” When it comes to earning tenure, professors are playing the game rather than producing content with value to the larger business community.

“…business school faculty are almost exclusively rewarded on two metrics,” writes Wetherbe and Eckhardt. “First, they are rewarded for the number of scientific papers that they write that are published in prestigious journals that are exclusively controlled by, and read by, other academics. Second, they are rewarded by their citation count—the number of times their articles are cited by articles from other professors.”

This tenure model is applied to faculty worldwide. With business school – which some consider an apprentice trade as much as an academic pursuit – tenure creates an untenable divide. If you focus on research, your audience is other academics who are insulated (to an extent) from ‘what’s happening this minute.’ These educators may cite your work in their own research, but it never really makes an impact where business is actually done. On the other hand, as Wetherbe and Eckhardt write, “Professors who attend industry conferences or immerse themselves in the practice of business decrease the chances of performing well on publication and cite counts.”

The end result is a “closed system,” where academics churn out an expansive body of work that “doesn’t address the real problems of entrepreneurs, managers, investors, marketers, and business leaders.”

Does this mean that business school research has little value to MBA programs? Quite the contrary, actually. Just imagine a world of pure practitioners, who teach from personal experience and stories collected from peers. Their scholarship would be the equivalent of Forbes and Linkedin columns – best practices in name only with limited applicability based on circumstance. They might be useful narrations of universal truths, but they would only be inspirational and conjectural starting points.

So how can academics produce research that businesses can use? Wetherbe and Eckhardt suggest that business programs follow the medical school model of delivering translational research. In this model, write the authors, “Translational research takes scientific research conducted in the lab and makes it useful to people. Fully integrated translational research faculty are tenured professors who practice medicine and use the latest scientific techniques to answer questions about those techniques from practicing physicians. In addition, they often coauthor research papers with basic scientists and collaborate on clinical initiatives with clinical faculty.”

In other words, business schools would partner with outside organizations for very specific practical ends. To achieve this, according to Wetherbe and Eckhardt, schools would need to change their appointment and tenure tactics. In particular, they would focus more heavily on hiring and rewarding professors who could balance research techniques with real life practice. They also suggest creating translational business journals, cultivating corporate research partners for funding, and factoring consulting work (and its results) more heavily into faculty evaluations.

Sound unlikely? Maybe. But businesses are predicated on customers. Ultimately, it is employers, not students, who are the true consumers of business schools. If schools are looking to deepen their partnerships with employers, research is another tool to produce mutual benefit.

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Source: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW