Enhancing the Practical Relevance of

Research
Michael W. Toffel

Working Paper 16-082

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of

Research
Michael W. Toffel
Harvard Business School

Working Paper 16-082

Copyright 2016 by Michael W. Toffel

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may
not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

Michael W. Toffel
Harvard Business School, Morgan Hall 415, Boston, Massachusetts 02163, USA
mtoffel@hbs.edu

Forthcoming in Production and Operations Management

March 6, 2016
This article seeks to encourage scholars to conduct research that is more relevant to the decisions
faced by managers and policymakers, and addresses why research relevance matters, what
relevance means in terms of a journal article, and how scholars can increase the relevance of their
research. I define relevant research papers as those whose research questions address problems
found (or potentially found) in practice and whose hypotheses connect independent variables
within the control of practitioners to outcomes they care about using logic they view as feasible. I
provide several suggestions for how scholars can enhance research relevance, including engaging
practitioners in on-campus encounters, at managerial conferences, and at crossover workshops;
conducting site visits and practitioner interviews; working as a practitioner; and developing a
practitioner advisory team. I describe several ways that scholars can convey relevant research
insights to practitioners, including presenting at practitioner conferences, writing for practitioners
in traditional crossover journals and in shorter pieces like op-eds and blogs, and attracting the
interest of those who write columns, blogs, and articles about research for practitioners. I conclude
by describing a few ways that academic institutions can encourage more relevant research,
focusing on journals, professional societies, and doctoral programs.
Key words: research questions, relevance, rigor, communication, practice-based research
History: Received: January 2016; Accepted: March 2016 by Kalyan Singhal after one revision.

1. Introduction
The theme of the 2015 annual conference of the Production and Operations Management Society
(POMS) was Expanding POM research, teaching, and practice to help organizations, society,
economies, and the environmentin other words, relevance. This reflects the Society
leaderships view that operations management (OM) research needs to be more relevant to the
world outside of academia.
I agree. Much of todays business school scholarship is far removed from the actual
practice of management, a process that unfolded over decades (Khurana 2007; Augier and March
2011). This transition seems especially odd that this is so true for OM scholarship too given the
fields roots in applied research a century ago that aimed to improve production processes. Some

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

of the most important research of that era was conducted by practitioners themselves, such as
Frederick Taylors scientific management work, Henry Gantts Gantt charts, and Ford W.
Harriss economic order quantity (EOQ) model. The assembly line, the Toyota Production
System, and statistical process control are also major developments in operations management
that came from practice (Fisher 2007). Yet if you were to show todays OM managers the titles
and abstracts from any recent issue of a top-tier OM journal, few would grant that we are
studying what they do. Even if a manager found a title promising, he or she would be hard
pressed to learn anything from the article itself, given how far academic vernacular has drifted
from ordinary English.
In this paper, I provide my perspective on why research relevance matters, what
relevance means in terms of a journal article, and how scholars can increase the relevance of
their research. The 2015 POMS conferences call for greater relevance in OM scholarship builds
on calls by some of the fields leading scholars to point the field toward more promising pastures
by developing a stronger empirical base (Fisher 2007b) and to pursue more interesting projects
(Cachon 2012). I also soon found that scholars of operations management and organizational
studies have been expressing concern for several decades about how irrelevant most management
scholarship is to practitioners.
Gene Woolsey was an early advocate of relevance in operations research (OR) (see, for
example, Woolsey 2003). A recent tribute by Camm (2015: 369) observed:
Genes position was that you, as an OR professional, shouldnt try to improve
someones process without getting experience with, and a good understanding of,
that process. Consequently, Genes students might find themselves riding along
with Denver firefighters or working the late shift at a brewery. Gene felt it was
offensive to those running the process for an OR person to think he (she) could
immediately step in and teach them how to improve that process.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

Nearly 40 years ago, Hall and Hess (1978) were also expressing concerns of how
operations research had grown increasingly disconnected from management practice. In 1993,
Corbett and Van Wassenhove (1993) observed that Harvard Business Reviews declining
coverage of operations research topics coincided with the fields growing unease about its
declining relevance. When Steven Graves became editor of Manufacturing & Service Operations
Management in 2009, he strongly encouraged more relevant research by calling for significantly
more papers that report on innovative implementations of OM research to real problems or that
rigorously document existing practice and demonstrate how current modeling approaches
succeed or fail in practice. I believe that our field is in desperate need of such work (Graves
2009: 1). Similarly, Van Mieghem (2013: 3) noted that the failure to pursue research questions
relevant to more than just fellow scholars carries the risk that research becomes an intellectual
exercise in self gratification, i.e., the quintessential ivory tower syndrome.
The need for more relevant research is a concern in other disciplines and academic
departments beyond business schools. In organizational studies, Janice Beyer, who would go on
to become the editor of Academy of Management Journal and then president of the Academy of
Management (AOM), lamented nearly 35 years ago that increasing numbers of organizational
scholars have begun to express concern that organizational/administrative science has had little
effect on life in organizations (Beyer 1982: 588). Thomas and Tymon (1982) noted that
organizational studies (a) were not addressing phenomena or goals that practitioners faced and
(b) were yielding results that were either obvious or unactionable. A decade later, the Academy
of Managements 1993 presidential addressprovocatively titled What If the Academy
Actually Mattered?referred to annual academic conferences as an incestuous, closed loop
because scholars were still presenting research of interest only to each other (Hambrick 1994:

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

13). Around the same time, the inaugural issue of Organization Science opened with a
lamentation that scholars were missing the opportunity to influence organizations, noting that
research on organizations has not typically focused on problems relevant to business and
government organizations, and the real world of organizations has not drawn on the work
undertaken by organizational scientists (Daft and Lewin 1990: 1). The lack of managerial
relevance has also been highlighted in the field of strategic management when Vermeulen (2005:
979), for example, observed that [b]y cutting practitioners as an audience out of the loop, we cut
out reality from the academic cycle.
Apparently, this history of dissatisfaction has not been sufficient, as it continues to this
day in various domains of management research. In his 2000 AOM Presidential Address, Walsh
observed that every year since Hambricks 1993 remarks, the AOM conference has heard
president after president bemoan our irrelevance (Walsh 2001: 216; examples include Mowday
1997 and Denisi 2010). The need for research to become more relevant continues to be voiced
about research in international management (e.g., Panda and Gupta 2014), operations
management (e.g., Gallien, Graves, Scheller-Wolf 2016), and decision support systems (Vizecky
and El-Gayar 2011). In 2014, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote: The most
stinging dismissal of a point is to say: Thats academic. In other words, to be a scholar is, often,
to be irrelevant (Brooks 2014). We can see, then, why the 2015 POMS conference chose its
theme of urging more relevant research but can reasonably anticipate that its calls for greater
relevance will not, on its own, bring much of a change.
This lack of influence doesnt reflect a lack of opportunity. As Brooks noted, Some of
the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but
most of them just dont matter in todays great debates. Its a sentiment shared by many others.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Michigans Andrew

Hoffman called for professors to contribute to public and political debates where expert
knowledge can move the conversation forward and noted that the scarcity of their contributions
is to the detriment of both the voting public and the academic community (Hoffman 2015).
Making operations management research more relevant to managers and policymakers
requires all of us to reflect on our ambition as professors (or soon-to-be professors). Most of us
would agree that our primary duties include teaching our students and generating new knowledge
in our research. But the lack of practical relevance of much of our research might suggest that
few of us also have the ambition to improve the decisions of the managers and policymakers
whose actions we study. Hambricks 1993 address said as much when he urged professors to
choose research topics that could improve management practice, imploring business school
faculty to recognize that our responsibility is not to ourselves, but rather to the institutions
around the world that are in dire need of improved management, as well as those individuals who
seek to be the most effective managers they possibly can be. It is time for us to matter
(Hambrick 1994: 13). As Cohen put it, this requires a change in attitude, from Pay attention to
what I do because I know what is important to How can I use my significant (academic) talents
to help? (Cohen 2007: 1017).
That Manufacturing & Service Operations Management recently published a special
issue on practice-focused research (vol. 18, no. 1, 2016) seems like a positive step, until we ask
why the field needs a special issue to encourage high-quality OM research focused on the
practice of OM (Gallien and Scheller-Wolf 2013: 1). Contrast this to the research conducted at
another type of professional school that sits on many of campuses: The Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA) does not require special issues to encourage medical scholars to

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

conduct research that helps doctors cure patients. (That said, even some domains of medical
research have been critiqued for being wasteful and lacking clinical relevance (Buchbinder,
Maher, and Harris 2015: 597)).
To be clear, these various calls for greater relevance should not be misconstrued to imply
that rigor need suffer. The decades-long debate (still going on in some quarters) about whether
research should be relevant or rigorous poses a false choice: research needs to be both, a point
others have been making for some time (Vermeulen 2005; Gulati 2007).
In the remainder of this article, I clarify what I mean by relevance in the context of a
research paper and describe several approaches that have helped me and other scholars make our
research more relevant. I then offer some suggestions for how scholars can communicate results
of relevant research to practitioners. I conclude with some suggestions for how our journals,
professional societies, and doctoral programs can foster more relevant research.

2. Defining Relevant Research

Anyone calling for more relevant scholarly research must clearly state what he or she means by
relevance. I dont mean impact which academics often measure as citation count, as that
assesses only how much attention a paper has attracted from fellow scholars. Instead, my focus is
on relevance to practice. To me, research is relevant if it has the potential to improve the decision
making of managers or policymakers, a group to which I refer collectively as practitioners. The
unit of analysis I am concerned with is a research paper intended to be published in a peerreviewed journal, since such articles are the primary intellectual currency of the OM field. To
me, research relevance is reflected in an articles research question, hypotheses, and
implications.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

2.1. Relevance in Research Questions

For those seeking to embark on a research project that will be relevant to practitioners, I suggest
proceeding with a project only if you can answer yes to all three of the following questions:
1. Is the research question novel to academics? For example, would answering the
question uncover new relationships between constructs, new nuances in relationships
already known, or new mechanisms to better understand what drives those relationships?
2. Is the research question relevant to practice? Could answering the question actually
influence the decisions of managers or policymakers? In other words, does the research
seek to solve a question of importance to practitioners working in that field?
(Vermeulen 2005: 980). Is the research focused on problems and other issues that
managers care about? (Gulati 2007: 780). One should also be able to specify which
practitioners in particular could benefit and how one knows that.
3. Can the research question be answered rigorously? For empirical work, one
consideration is whether data are available with which to convincingly measure the
constructs. Also, for research that seeks to reveal causal relationships and not mere
correlations, does the context or data support a convincing identification strategy? For
example, a study revealing that inventory levels are positively correlated with sales
volumes is not nearly as informative to practitioner decision making as a causal study that
reveals how inventory policies affect sales.
The first and third questions are familiar. What I want to emphasize is that scholarly novelty and
rigor are just as important when considering which relevant research questions to pursue.
Wein (2009: 808) describes a broadly similar heuristic he uses to decide which research
projects are likely to have a big impact on public policy:

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

My rule of thumb for working on a problem was whether the answers to the
following four questions were yes, no, no, and yes: Is the problem very important
(i.e., could it directly or indirectly lead to catastrophic consequences)? Has the
problem been sufficiently addressed in the academic literature? Has the problem
been satisfactorily addressed by policy makers? Would the problem be fun (i.e.,
sufficiently challenging) to work on?
Gallien and Scheller-Wolf (2013: 2) provide another useful set of assessment criteria for
practice-based research:
How important and challenging is the OM problem considered? How applicable
and relevant are the research results presented for practitionersare the results
having a significant effect on practice now and/or are they likely to have a
significant effect in the near future? How novel is the problem considered, the
methodological contribution, and/or the insights generated? How large and
convincing is the impact reported (if applicable)?
And Gallien, Graves, and Scheller-Wolf (2016: 7) assert that the practical relevance of research
depends on how much the research question matters to society, and how useful the answer from
the research is. They also highlight the potential for tension between a research questions
generalizabilitythe extent to which [it] is of interest to a large number of practitionersand
its validitythe extent to which research results and prescriptions (or predictions) are wellfounded and apply effectively to real-world operations (Gallien, Graves, and Scheller-Wolf
2016: 7). For a taxonomy of various forms of relevance, see Nicolai and Seidl (2010).
2.2. Relevance in Hypotheses
Relevant research hypotheses should have relevant consequents (measured as dependent
variables) and relevant antecedents (measured as independent variables), and the proposed
relationship between them should be sensibly grounded.
Relevant research should hypothesize consequents that managers care about. Operations
scholars know better than scholars in most other disciplines that practitioners care about
performance across many domains, well beyond such financial indicators as stock price and sales

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

volume. Classic examples include quality, labor utilization, on-time delivery, and productivity.
Contemporary examples include occupational safety, environmental impact, and transparency.
As for antecedents, relevant research ought to consider the levers that practitioners
actually have at their disposal. For example, many managers can implement specific activities,
whether it be standardized programs such as the ISO 9001 Quality Management System
Standard; tools such as statistical process control; or policies such as staffing rules, audit
schemes, and training programs. But researchers seeking to examine the impact of bundles of
activities such as supply chain capabilities bear the burden of conveying how such bundles can
be implemented in the first place.
Relationships between consequents and antecedents should be grounded in the scholarly
literature to be sure, but should also be grounded in reality. Does the flow of logical ideas that
forms the rationale for your hypotheses resonate with at least some practitioners? If not, is that
because your rationale is divorced from reality? As I will discuss below, listening carefully to
practitioners responses to proposed hypotheses can be very instructive. What do they find
implausible and why? What alternative explanations do they offer? What conditions or
limitations do they propose?
When empirically testing relationships, due consideration needs to be given to whether
revealing mere associations would be sufficiently relevant and potentially actionable, or whether
only revealing causal relationships would be. When causality is the goal, appropriate techniques
to address endogeneity need to be brought to bear to avoid bias (e.g., Semadeni, Withers, Certo
2014). No level of rigor can make an inherently irrelevant question relevant (or, for that matter,
uninteresting questions interesting).

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

10

2.3. Relevance in Implications

Relevant research should articulate implications that encourage practitioners to take action based
on the findings. Researchers should therefore state clearly how their results should influence
practitioners decisions, using specific examples when possible and circumscribing the
circumstances under which the findings are likely to apply. This means includingand taking
quite seriouslyan implications for practice section in papers and, ideally, vetting drafts of
this section with pertinent practitioners.

3. Enhancing Research Relevance

Choosing a research question that could be relevant is one thing. Conducting research that is
relevant is another. Because scholars tend to have little or no work experience in the fields they
study, we need ways to cross the gap between our perceptions and the workplace realities,
including an understanding of what issues are most important and the challenges associated with
implementing operational changes. One of the easiest ways to learn what is important to
practitioners is to read the popular press and the industry press. For example, to learn what
managers are thinking about with respect to environmental issues in their operations and supply
chains, I read online newsletters and magazines aimed at environmental management
professionals and environmentalists, and I subscribe to updates about pending environmental
laws and regulations. But thats just the tip of the iceberg. Dialogue and direct observation are
better ways to figure out what research topics are relevant to practitioners, which independent
variables are actually in their control, which outcomes they care about and how they typically
measure them, and whether your rationale linking inputs to outcomes seems plausible. As Robert
Hayes, a steadfast advocate for greater research relevance and tighter connections between
academics and practitioners (Fisher 2007a), wrote, we in academia have a great deal to learn

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

11

from those out on the firing lineif we care to listen to them (Hayes 1998: 96). Below, I
describe several ways to accomplish that.
3.1. Create On-campus Encounters
Many of us invite practitioners to guest lecture to our students, but such visits also provide an
opportunity, perhaps while hosting our guest speakers for breakfast or lunch, to solicit feedback
on our research ideas.
Student groups, too, invite practitioners to speak to student groups and at conferences
they organize. Such visits provide additional opportunities for faculty to meet practitioners right
on campus without having to manage the logistics. All we have to do is get on the email lists that
announce these visits so that we can schedule a meeting with the speaker while he or she is on
campus. I have found it critical to make these plans in advance because many practitioners
schedule their visits fairly tightly around meetings arranged in advance.
For faculty at schools that offer executive education, those studentsin ones own class
or in othersare also the practitioners from whom we could be learning (Tushman and OReilly
2007). Identifying executive education students who could be helpful to you might require some
coordination with the executive education program office. For example, faculty could share with
those staff members the managerial roles and industries they wish to learn about, so that the staff
can suggest particular participants.
3.2. Attend Practitioner Conferences
Academics rarely attend practitioner conferenceswhere managers or policymakers present to
each otherbut they should. Conferences provide an opportunity to learn what practitioners
consider to be their own best practices and current challenges and how they react to potential
solutions presented by others. For example, managerial conferences relevant to my sustainable

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

12

operations research include the Ceres annual conference (a network of investors, companies and
public interest groups to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices and
solutions to build a healthy global economy), the National Association for Environmental
Management (NAEM) annual conference (which purports to be the largest annual gathering for
environment, health and safety (EHS) and sustainability decision-makers), and GRI Global
Conferences (the worlds largest gathering of leaders, thinkers and doers in the field of
sustainability reporting). I have also met managers engaged in global supply chain auditing by
attending and presenting at the Ethical Sourcing Forum, an annual practitioner conference.
I have also met policymakers and managers at workshops run by regulators. Regulatory
workshops at which Ive presented include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencys
National Training Conference on the Toxics Release Inventory and Next Generation
Environmental Compliance Workshop, and the U.S. Department of Labors Use of Workers
Compensation Data for Occupational Safety and Health workshop.
These types of conferences provide low-stress networking opportunities to ask managers
for quick feedback about your research ideas and hypotheses. These conversations can initiate
enduring relationships that could, in turn, lead some of the practitioners to become members of
your practitioner sounding board (described below).
3.3. Attend Crossover Workshops
Crossover workshops are one of the best ways for scholars to ensure that their research ideas
and hypotheses are relevant to practice and grounded in reality. Crossover workshops bring
practitioners and scholars together to discuss research and typically include scholars presenting
both preliminary research ideas and late-stage research to solicit feedback from managers or
policymakers, with these practitioners sharing the latest trends and challenges in the field and

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

13

their wish lists of research questions that they would like answered. Because these events
attract practitioners interested in academic researchand because of their smaller scale, typically
involving 50150 participantsscholars can (a) identify new research ideas and hypotheses, (b)
network with practitioners who could then be their sounding boards, and (c) find out what
language and logic resonates with practitioners andjust as importantlywhat does not.
Some of the longest-running OM crossover workshops are the Consortium for
Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER), organized annually since 1998 by my Harvard
colleague Ananth Raman and Whartons Marshall Fisher (COER 2015a, 2015b), and the Service
Supply Chain Thought Leaders Forum (Cohen 2015), organized several times since 2002 by
Whartons Morris Cohen. The COER conferences is rooted in a research project Ananth Raman
and Marshall Fischer started in 1997 that sought to address the question, How will advances in
information technology change the way retailers forecast demand and plan supply? With
assistance from Harvards Walt Salmon, they recruited 32 retailers to participate, conducted
multi-day site visits to most of them to understand their operations, and conducted research
projects with some of them to improve their operations. The initial COER conferences, held in
1998 at Harvard and in 1999 at Wharton, reported progress of these projects to the 32
participating retailers. COER conferences have been held nearly annually since then with an
increasing group of participants.
But because these events tend to be small and invitation-only, scholars interested in
adopting this approach should consider organizing their own crossover workshops in their own
subfields. For example, Jrmie Gallien, Karan Girotra, Marcelo Olivares, Kamalini Ramdas,
and Jeff Skinner organized a Collaborative Academic/Practitioner Workshop on Operational

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

14

Innovation at London Business School in 2013 for academics and practitioners to learn from
successful academicpractitioner research collaborations.
I have co-organized several crossover workshops and was impressed by how much I
learned and by the interesting practitioners I met. John Mayo (Georgetown), Tom Lyon
(University of Michigan), and I co-organized Transparency and Accountability: The Role of
Information Disclosure, bringing together scholars and regulators interested in the effectiveness
of information disclosure on altering firms operational behavior (HBS 2008). Ginger Jin
(University of Maryland) and I co-organized a workshop called Research on Effective
Government: Inspection and Compliance that assembled more than 100 scholars and regulators
to discuss evidence-based approaches to bolster regulatory compliance (see Blanding 2015, HBS
2015; MCEP 2015). Scholars presented key findings from recent research, regulators provided
feedback and suggested research questions they wanted answered, and members of both groups
forged new relationships with each other.
3.4. Conduct Field Visits and Practitioner Interviews
Scholars can learn by directly observing what operations people do at work. Field work has a
long tradition in many disciplines, perhaps most notably cultural anthropology and sociology, but
also in OM; Fisher (2007b) profiles examples in the auto industry and other contexts. One might
think it serves only to provide an empirical base for qualitative scholarly work and teaching
cases. But field work can be very helpful to any OM scholarincluding modelers and
quantitative empiricistsbecause it involves observing practitioners in action, the problems they
face, and the solutions they try. The chance to ask questions of practitionerswhat exactly is
going on here and why?can lead to more relevant research questions and hypotheses. Hayes

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

15

(2000) describes additional benefits of and approaches to observing and learning from
practitioners in action.
Each of us can take action on this front immediately. In my research that entails empirical
analysis of archival data, my coauthors and I often interview practitioners to learn how they
perceive the problems we are considering studying. We also seek their ideas for hypotheses and
their feedback on our preliminary ideas. This has often led us to revise our initial questions and
hypotheses to those that are more relevant to and well-grounded in the situation we are studying.
We have also learned institutional details critical to identification strategies, such as how workers
are assigned to tasks.
Faculty in schools that produce teaching cases can leverage site visits set up for case
research to also ask practitioners about their research ideas. Others need to find ways to get
themselves invited to field sites; a good start is to meet practitioners on campus and at
conferences, as described above. OM scholars can take advantage of institutional initiatives
designed to promote faculty access to field sites. At Harvard, for example, the Behavioral
Insights Group fosters opportunities for faculty to collaborate with practitioners to conduct field
experiments to improve organizational practices, while the Sustainability, Transparency, and
Accountability Research (STAR) Lab does the same for scholars of those topics.
3.5. Work as a Practitioner
One of the best ways for scholars to learn the practical dimensions of the workplaces they are
studying is to actually work as a practitioner through a short-term or part-time position, shifting
ones role from an observer to an actor. A scholar interested in, say, ambulance scheduling could
volunteer with an ambulance company to better understand the challenges its people face.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

16

Dedicating substantial time to work as a practitioner is more common in some

disciplines. Some economics professors and law professors take leaves of absence to assume
government positions. This is not just for the occasional Larry Summers or Elizabeth Warren;
there are many opportunities for junior and mid-career faculty. For example, many roles at the
Council of Economic Advisors are filled by assistant and associate professors on leave from their
ladder faculty positions. There are also opportunities to become resident and non-resident
fellows and affiliates of think tanks such as the Brookings Institute, Resources for the Future,
and the Public Policy Institute of California, which can, in turn, foster introductions to
practitioners from whom scholars can obtain feedback on their research ideas.
3.6. Develop a Sounding Board of Practitioners
Many ideas in this section can provide ad hoc insights from practitioners, but even better would
be to develop relationships with practitioners whom you can call upon regularly. For example,
you could ask these practitioners whether your research questions strike them as important and,
if not, how to improve them. You could also ask whether potential hypotheses are sensibly
linking independent variables that they can control to dependent variables they actually care
about and whether the logic underlying your hypotheses is well grounded in reality. As Fisher
(2007b: 373) noted, Something as simple as a conversation with a manager over lunch can be
extremely useful in identifying problems and hypotheses for further investigation.
How do you assemble such a group? My practitioner advisory team includes former
classmates who now work as environmental, health, and safety (EHS) managers; managers and
regulators whom I met at practitioner conferences; and managers whom I met while writing
teaching cases about their companies. Current and former students from undergraduate, MBA,

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

17

and executive education programs can also be excellent sources of information about whether
your research questions, mechanisms, and implications are relevant to practicing managers.
3.7. Coauthor with Practitioners
Operations management, more so than many other management fields, has a long tradition of
working and coauthoring with practitioners. Such collaborations not only can provide access to
proprietary data and nuanced interpretations of that information, but can also ground the research
project in questions relevant to practice, produce papers depicting mechanisms and
interpretations that seem plausible to practitioners, and generally intensify a practitioner
collaborator's dedication to your project. Stanfords Laurence Wein (2009: 809), reflecting on his
experience, notes how practitioner coauthors contribute contextual detailsthat would have
been impossible to find in the open literature. Gallien, Graves, and Scheller-Wolf (2016)
provide useful guidance on how to establish and manage successful relationships with
collaborating practitioners.

4. Conveying Relevant Insights to Practitioners

When I was first exposed to academic journals in graduate school, I quickly discovered that
despite business schools being referred to as professional schools, no managers I knew were
equippedor patient enoughto decipher academic articles, laced as they were with jargon,
math, and statistics. But surely, I presumed, there were mechanisms to convey the insights of the
research in a more broadly intelligible and actionable way. It took me about a decade to realize
how wrong I was and how little investment there is in such mechanisms.
How can scholars reach practitioners? Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, like
other deans, meets with alumni all over the world. Over the past few years, he has been asking
them where they learn the most useful ideas to improve their businesses. Not where they learn

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

18

good ideas or interesting ideas, but ideas they have actually put into practice. In addition to
Harvard Business Review, the answers Nohria hears most often include reports from the
McKinsey Global Institute and other think tanks. TED Talks also make the list, as do managers
at peer companies who share best practices at industry conferences and networking events. I
would add to this list my conjecture that practitioners also learn a lot from the popular press and
blogs they read, and from other crossover journals and conferences described below.
This section offers three ways scholars can convey research findings to the practitioners
whose decisions they hope to influence: speaking at practitioner conferences, writing for
publications read by practitioners, and attracting coverage by others who write for those
publications.
4.1. Present to Practitioners
Presenting research at practitioner conferences lets you not only convey your insights directly to
those whose decisions you want to influence, but also hear their questions and comments. This
can help you sharpen your message and can trigger new relevant research. Presenting at
practitioner conferences, I was usually one of the few academics there. These seem like an
extremely underutilized opportunity to bridge the academicpractitioner divide. Scholars can
contact conference organizers, who are often eager to find interesting speakers. Crossover
conferences like COER, mentioned earlier, also offer beneficial access to practitioners.
There are also opportunities in less public settings, such as presenting research findings to
executive education participants in class or over lunch and meeting face-to-face with managers
and policymakers to brief them on your findings and insights. My coauthors Matt Johnson and
David Levine and I have presented our research on occupational safety to OSHA managers; both
they and we learned a lot. Wein (2009: 809) observes that while finding policymakers willing to

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

19

meet with him to discuss his latest research findings is extremely time-consuming and at times
very contentious, I think it is quite likely that none of my work would have had any impact if I
(or Ed Kaplan, in the case of our smallpox work) had stayed in my office.
4.2. Write for Practitioners
Crossover journals and the trade press. Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review,
and California Management Review are the gold standard of crossover journals for some faculty
because of their prestige and their circulation, not to mention their inclusion on the Financial
Times journals list that some schools use to determine which publications count toward
promotion. However, they cover only a very small fraction of OM research, and their editorial
scopes leave some topics not covered at all. Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management
Review have also begun publishing shorter online-only articles that are often processed more
rapidly, enabling faculty to post research insights in a more timely manner, but those lack the
prestige of long-form articles published in the hardcopy magazines.
Narrower crossover journals provide another option. For example, Interfaces was
launched in 1970 to be informative, easy to read, brisk (for busy managers), topical, relevant,
and professional [and to] publish digests and highlights of current, interesting, and useful work
in the world of managing and the management sciences (Norden 1970: 1). Its current
submission guidelines call for papers on the practice of operations research and management
science (OR/MS) and the impact this practice has on organizations. Academy of Management
Perspectives is a journal aimed at the non-specialist academic reader with a secondary audience
that include existing and future thought leaders; it publishes articles that synthesiz[e] and
translat[e] theoretical and empirical research in managements distinct sub-fields in an

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

20

authoritative evidential manner that makes these findings accessible for scholars outside that
subfield [sic] (Academy of Management 2016).
Writing for these crossover outlets requires significant time and effort and can involve a
lengthy editing process, a peer review process, or both, which makes this a substantial endeavor
with an uncertain payoff. Fortunately, some of these outlets welcome proposals, which can save
authors from wasting time developing pieces that the editors wont want.
Trade journals and the popular press also offer academics a way to reach practitioners
one that academics seldom use. Writing short articles aimed at practitioners can be fun because
the sole objective is to convey the most important findings in an engaging manner. For example,
Yales Ed Kaplan has published in venues such as Interfaces and the Boston Globe about the
implications of his research on the prevention of HIV transmission and terrorist attacks. I have
found it very rewarding to write short articles summarizing my research findings for venues such
as The Guardians sustainable business section, The Compass (a trade journal for health and
safety professionals), The Atlantic, and European CEO. Such articles require a more
conversational writing style than academics are accustomed to, but they have helped me hone the
takeaways of my academic papers and better convey their value to practitioners.
Newspaper op-eds. Scholars conducting relevant research can also reach practitioners
and the consumers and citizens who might influence themthrough newspaper op-eds. Wein,
who has written a series of New York Times op-eds describing policy prescriptions to stem
pandemicsbased on his researchnotes that op-eds and the resulting media coverage can both
educate the public and pressure policymakers to act on ones research findings.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

21

Blogs and social media. Some OM professors have developed blogs to summarize the
findings of their own and others research and to analyze news items through an OM lens.
Leading examples include:

better operations: Thoughts on continuous improvement: from TPS to XPS by Norwegian

University of Science and Technologys Torbjrn Netland at better-operations.com

Ecommerce thoughts from Ann Arbor by University of Michigans Amitabh Sinha at

ecommerceaa.blogspot.com

Global Supply Chain Musings by Purdues Ananth Iyer at aviyer2010.wordpress.com

Jay and Barrys OM Blog: A Blog for OM Educators by Jay Heizer (Texas Lutheran) and
Barry Render (Rollins) at heizerrenderom.wordpress.com; also provides questions to
prompt classroom discussion

The Operations Room by Northwesterns Marty Lariviere, Gad Allon, and Jan Van
Mieghem at operationsroom.wordpress.com

UCLA Anderson Global Supply Chain Blog by UCLAs Chris Tang, Felipe Caro, Charles
Corbett, and colleagues at blogs.anderson.ucla.edu/global-supply-chain
Many more blogs on OM topics are listed at SupplyChainOpz (2014, 2016).
Many other disciplines have pursued this idea, with some of the resulting blogs attracting

very wide audiences. University of Chicagos Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner launched the
Freakonomics blog and podcast (http://freakonomics.com/blog) to translate new findings from
economic research in a clever and engaging manner, building on the momentum of their popular
book of the same title. Penn Laws Cary Coglianese created the RegBlog website and enewsletter (www.regblog.org) to convey to practitioners and scholars insights from regulatory
analyses and news; most of its articles are written by Penn faculty or students. Harvard Law
Schools Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
(corpgov.law.harvard.edu) blog and newsletter translate research on corporate governance and
financial regulation. Some professional societies have created blogs for their members to
translate their research. Examples include the blogs established by the Alliance for Research on

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

22

Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) (http://corporate-sustainability.org/blog/) and by the Academy

of Managements Organizations and the Natural Environment division
(http://one.aom.org/blogs/blog/152).
Some faculty use Twitter to share research insights and comment on news items to their
tens of thousands of followers. Leading examples include Austin Goolsbee (University of
Chicago economics), Ioannis Ioannou (London Business School strategy), and Justin Wolfers
(University of Michigan economics). Some faculty use LinkedIn; Wharton psychology professor
Adam Grants posts, for example, have attracted as many as hundreds of thousands of views.
Faculty from a wide range of disciplines have presented highly engaging TED Talks to
convey their research findings to the general public (www.ted.com). For example, MITs Zeynep
Ton highlighted her research insights on the relationship between wages and service in a TED
Talk that has attracted tens of thousands of views. Our field has much learn from behavioral
scientists whose TED Talks have been watched millions of times, such as those by Harvard
Business School social psychologist Amy Cuddy, Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely, and
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert.
4.3. Encourage Others to Convey Your Research to Practitioners
Jane Lubchenco, a professor who has also served as head of a federal agency, observed that
academics often lack the skills to translate complex information into simpler but still accurate
information [and are] uncomfortable with modes of communication that are effective in public
communicationstorytelling, using analogies and metaphors (Hoffman et al. 2015: 72). Many
are reluctant to invest the time and energy to learn a new writing style. Fortunately, one
alternative to your writing an article that conveys your research to practitioners is to encourage
someone else who already possesses the requisite skills to do it. This requires identifying suitable

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

23

blogssuch as those described aboveand newspaper or magazine columns that disseminate

research findings to practitioners and convincing their authors to cover your research. Doing so
enables scholars to leverage someone elses expertise in writing engagingly and his or her
established communication channel to practitioners. In some cases, these benefits well exceed
the drawback of losing editorial control. Identifying these individuals requires research and
networking, and school and university press offices could help develop and disseminate press
releases and practitioner articlesbut only if those offices mandate were expanded beyond their
typical focus on campus events and administrative news, a step that deans and university
presidents should seriously consider.
Columns. Some faculty write newspaper columns that translate their own and others
research. Examples include a Boston Globe column by Harvards Edward Glaeser, a Le Monde
column by Harvards Julie Battilana, and the Economic View column, by Cornells Robert
Frank, that ran in the New York Times. The New York Times Upshot column, written by both
professors and professional journalists, compellingly conveys research findings as well.
Trade journals. Trade journals, which contain news and information for specific
practitioner groups, can provide a well-targeted channel for OM research insights. Faculty can
try to attract coverage by pitching their findings to the editors and writers of journals such as
APICS (the journal of the American Production and Inventory Control Society), Hotel
Management, Operational Risk & Regulation, Operations Management, Safety & Health
Practitioner, and Supply Chain Management Review.
4.4. Communication Style to Reach Practitioners
Presenting to and writing for practitioners requires a communication style very different from the
one in which scholars are immersed. As Hoffman (2016: 13) notes, Speaking to lay audiences

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

24

is, in many ways, like speaking another language. For many of us, whatever gifts of
engagement and vitality our writing once had has diminished through our doctoral training and
the peer-review process. As a result, most of us have become all too familiar with academic
writing that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and
impossible to understand (Pinker 2014).
While it remains important to convey why readers should believe your findings, writing
for practitioners requires learning (or rediscovering) how to write journalistically. For example, it
often requires engaging the reader right from the start. One way is to set up your research
question as an important puzzle that needed solving and then concisely describe your findings.
Illustrative anecdotes can be especially helpful. It is rare that a practitioner audience will care to
hear about the prior literature, although this is not a universal rule. If, for example, your findings
contradict prior findings or expand or contract the application of those findings, it certainly
makes sense to state what was known before your research. There is little tolerance for academic
jargon or esoteric terms such as endogeneity, stochastic, or deterministic. Pages of scholarly
description of study details are often consolidated into a single paragraph. Simple graphs often
convey the results more clearly to practitioners than statistics and regression coefficients do.
Speculating what our findings might mean beyond our context and sample is often quite
difficult for scholars, given our trainingand the ever-present reminders by our peer
reviewersto avoid overclaiming. However, practitioner outlets typically want academics to
convey the lessons practitioners should take away from our research, which often requires a leap
beyond our particular settings. I have found it important to maintain the distinction between what
my studies have actually found and what my coauthors and I might reasonably speculate based
on our findings.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

25

I often find it helpful to read many articles in the practitioner outlet I am seeking to
publish in to absorb its writing style and to learn how other academics have addressed these
challenges. Hiring editors have helped me rediscover how to write to nonacademic audiences.
University communications departmentsand publicists, for schools or professors willing to
hire themcan also play an important role by identifying and pitching your research to venues
read by your target practitioner audience. For more comprehensive guidance on writing for
practitioners, see Emerald Group (2014) and OHara (2014).

5. How Academic Institutions Need to Change

I have focused so far on what scholars can do to increase their own relevance. But academic
institutions can also do a lot to foster a research culture that promotes relevance. While others
have encouraged business schools to modify their tenure criteria to give more weight to
relevance when evaluating research (e.g., Walsh 2011), I focus on changes that could be made
more immediately by our journals, professional societies, and doctoral programs.
5.1. Academic Journals
Journal editors could require (or at least ask) authors to articulate the relevance (or potential
relevance) of their research to some set of practitioners. POM recently launched an alternative
approach by creating a POM Practice area to encourage studies that highlight problems in a
particular industry sector and develop potentially amenable or improved OM solutions,
requiring that the problem be based on a real situation faced by a company (or multiple
companies in the same industry) and that the proposed solution be practical and generalizable.
Gallien, Graves, and Scheller-Wolf (2016: 13) suggest that all OM research should be evaluated
not only based on its correctness and novelty, but also how well it applies to the real world.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

26

Editors can also accelerate the publication process for the research most relevant to current
challenges.
Journals can also create the infrastructure to communicate research insights to
practitioners. Some, including Management Science and POM, already provide brief
management insights for articles, although they are often not readily comprehensible to
practitioners and are posted behind a paywall that severely limits practitioners and the press from
accessing them. Journals can and should do better ensure the accessibility of such pieces by
editing them with an eye toward practitioner readers and making them publicly available. Chris
Tang in his role of M&SOM Editor-in-Chief recently took such a step when that journal
launched M&SOM Review in 2015. This initiative invites authors of recently published
M&SOM articles to write short, publicly-accessible pieces that distill the[ir] essence to enable
non-OM researchers to see through the thicket of technical analysis; appreciate the relevance
of various M&SOM articles; andapply the research findings (Tang 2014). Nearly 20 such
pieces were posted throughout 2015. More journals should adopt this practice, and go beyond
this by providing professional writers to help researchers develop press releases and short pieces
that translate their research insights to practitioners and place these in venues that reach
practitioners.
Several recent initiatives have begun to address some of these objectives. POM is
planning to launch an online extension by publishing publicly available short pieces in which
scholars convey the managerial insights of their POM articles (Singhal, Sodhi, and Tang 2014).
Strategic Management Journal has recently begun encouraging authors of accepted papers to
develop short video abstracts that highlight research insights, posted publicly at
www.youtube.com/user/StrategicMgmtSociety. The new Academy of Management Perspectives

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

27

initiative to publish research briefs at http://aom.org/amp/researchbriefs is meant to provide

journalistic summaries of select empirical articles published in other journals that are of
interest to scholars and practitioners.
Behavioral Science & Policy is a new peer-reviewed journal that is attempting to bridge
the scholarpractitioner gap in novel ways. It features short, accessible articles describing
actionable policy applications of behavioral scientific research that serves the public interest
and has a dual-review process. Leading scholars from specific disciplinary areas review articles
to assess their scientific rigor; at the same time, experts in relevant policy areas evaluate them for
relevance and feasibility of implementation. Moreover, accepted articles are edited to ensure
their accessibility to scientists, policy makers, and lay readers.
5.2. Professional Societies
Professional societies offer a few awards to honor relevant research. For example, the Institute
for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) offers a Revenue
Management and Pricing Section Practice Award to recognize outstanding applications of
revenue management and pricing techniques. The POMS Applied Research Challenge award
honors rigorous applied research that is relevant and innovative that involves a real
operation and makes a convincing case of its relevance to practice, among other criteria (Caro
and Tang 2015: 359). And M&SOM just announced its Practice-Based Research Competition
to motivate, help develop, reward and highlight high-quality OM research papers with
significant practical relevance, and to publish these papers in the M&SOM journal (M&SOM
2016).
The INFORMS Saul Goss Expository Writing Award recognizes researchers whose
articles demonstrate a consistently high standard of expository writing. The Academy of

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

28

Managements Organizations and the Natural Environment (AOM ONE) Division and the
Network for Business Sustainability co-sponsor a Research Impact on Practice Award for peerreviewed research on any dimension of social or environmental sustainability that has
important implications for practice. The Strategic Management Society awards its SMS Best
Conference Paper Prize for Practice Implications to the best paper with practitioner relevance.
Gallien, Graves, and Scheller-Wolf (2016) argue that more prizes and awards for high quality
research based on scholar practitioner collaborations could help increase its prominence and
thus encourage more of it.
Professional societies could do a lot more. As Ackoff (1979: 194) suggested nearly 40
years ago, professional societies in the operations field could use their conferences not only to
facilitate communication among their academic members, but also to bring in ideas from
practitioners from whom [the academics] can learn something relevant. At least one of the
society's meetings each year and one of its publications should be filled with contributions from
such outsiders. The POMS annual conferences recently began featuring a POMS Practice
Leaders Forum in which practitioners suggest research ideas to academics (Singhal, Sodhi, and
Tang 2014). Professional societies and universities can also create online clearinghouses to help
researchers and practitioners identify research projects of mutual interest. For example, the
Harvard Business School Research Exchange website lists field study ideas for which HBS
professors and doctoral students are seeking corporate settings
(http://hbswk.hbs.edu/Pages/classified.aspx). Such exchanges, whether implemented at
conferences or online, are a promising idea that can massively scale the engagement that occurs
at the specialized crossover conferences described earlier.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

29

Ackoff (1979: 195) also recommended that professional societies establish at least one
journal addressed to their actual and potential consumersthat might be called For Managers
Only [to] contain relevant articles addressed to managers. Each member of the Society would
designate a manager to whom a copy would be sent at no cost. While professional societies
have launched crossover journals like Academy of Management Perspectives and INFORMSs
Interfaces, their attempt to reach two disparate audiencesacademics and practitionersmay be
limiting their success in reaching practitioners. Ackoffs suggestion to narrow the target audience
of certain journals to managers could address this.
Professional societies could also take the lead in better equipping faculty to successfully
engage with practitioners by including sessions on managing media inquiries, writing op-eds and
for the trade press, disseminating research insights through social media, and learning how to
identify the key publications and reporters with whom to develop relationships. Stanford
Universitys Leopold Leadership Program, for example, trains midcareer academic scientists
from across North America to learn how to engage effectively with leaders in the public and
private sectors who face complex decisions about sustainability and the environment (Leopold
Leadership Program 2016). The non-profit COMPASS was created to help ocean scientists better
convey insights of marine research to the general public, policymakers, and managers (Smith et
al. 2013). Professional societies or universities could develop similar initiatives for OM scholars
(and researchers from many other business school domains) to learn how to more effectively
communicate research insights to practitioners.
5.3. Doctoral Programs
We also need to encourage and train our doctoral students to nurture the desire to conduct
relevant research and to acquire the knowledge to do so, including by encouraging them to

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

30

engage with practitioners. Vermeulen (2005: 980-981) observed by reading doctoral program
applications that very few people aspire to become business academics with the intention to
publish journal articles that will only be read by other academics (at best); rather, these
applicants are much more inspired by the thought of gaining and developing truly relevant
knowledge that might change the world of organizations. Hoffman (2016: 6) similarly notes that
[m]any graduate students report that they have chosen a research career precisely because they
want to contribute to the real world; to offer their knowledge and expertise in order to make a
difference. Therefore, we may not need to convince them to pursue relevant research but rather
to show them how to avoid the insular scholarly view and style that will frustrate their original
ambition to serve a real-world audience.
We can begin right away by having our students participate in the site visits and
interviews described earlier. We can also shift our program requirements to ensure that all
doctoral students engage with practitioners. At Harvard Business School, we have begun
institutionalizing this idea with a requirement that doctoral students spend some time in the field,
typically in their second or third year. Similarly, London Business Schools PhD program in
Management Science and Operations requires students to spend a month in the field. Such
initiatives encourage students to learn about practitioners experiences and challenges, and to
engender a habit of engagement to ensure that their research remains relevant throughout their
careers. Tushman and OReilly (2007) provide additional suggestions for how doctoral programs
could better foster research that is both relevant and rigorous.

6. Final Thoughts
One concern I often hear about conducting more relevant research is that it takes more time.
Many of the approaches described here do require time, although most do not take much:

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

31

perhaps a few additional days per research project to conduct some due diligence and to obtain
feedback. Given the time we already invest in any research project, a few days of due diligence
does not seem too high a price to pay, even in ones pre-tenure years when the opportunity cost
of time seems especially high. And against the initial investment one must balance the potential
for a positive feedback loop. Engaging with practitioners to develop relevant research not only
helps improve the research, but also increases the likelihood that practitioners will subsequently
read and appreciate a translation of that work. This can yield practitioner inquiries that can, in
turn, provide access to new field sites and new datasets, including proprietary data that has never
been shared with scholars before and can lead to novel lines of inquiry. Similarly, engaging in
relevant researchand especially choosing to work on problems connected to societys pressing
problemscan foster much needed engagement by scholars in public and political discourse
(Hoffman et al. 2015, Hoffman 2016).
In the end, how can we know if our field has succeeded in making our research relevant?
As Hayes noted more than a decade ago, well know when OM faculty become the people to
whom high-level, practicing operations managers and consultants turn for information and
insight about the most important problems confronting them (Hayes 2000: 110). But I suspect
that day when practitioners will regularly seek to learn from us will occur only after enough of us
scholars regularly seek to learn from them.

Acknowledgements
This article elaborates on my remarks at a plenary session on research relevance at the 2015
POMS conference. I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments from Aaron Chatterji, Marshall
Fisher, Jrmie Gallien, Joe Havely, Andrew Hoffman, Carmen Nobel, Jan Rivkin, and Laurence
Wein, and Harvard Business Schools Division of Research and Faculty Development for

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

32

financial support. Disclosures: Ed Kaplan was my MBA professor at Yale School of

Management in the mid-1990s; I am a board member of the Alliance for Research on Corporate
Sustainability.

References
Ackoff, R. L. 1979. Resurrecting the future of operational research. Journal of the Operational
Research Society 30(3) 189199.
Academy of Management. 2016. Academy of Management Perspectives. Available at
http://aom.org/amp/ (accessed January 2016).
Augier, M., J. G. March. 2011. The Roots, Rituals, and Rhetorics of Change: North American
Business Schools after the Second World War. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Beyer, J. M. 1982. Introduction to the special issue on the utilization of organizational research.
Administrative Science Quarterly 27(4) 588590.
Blanding, M. 2015. Business research that makes for smarter public policy. HBS Working
Knowledge, October 19. Available at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/business-research-thatmakes-for-smarter-public-policy.
Brooks, D. 2014. Professors, we need you! New York Times (February 16): SR11.
Buchbinder, R., C. Maher, I. A. Harris. 2015. Setting the research agenda for improving health
care in musculoskeletal disorders. Nature Reviews Rheumatology 11(10) 597605.
Cachon, G. P. 2012. What is interesting in operations management? Manufacturing & Service
Operations Management 14(2) 166169.
Camm, J. D. 2015. In memoriamRobert E. D. (Gene) Woolsey. Interfaces 45(4) 369.
Caro, F., Tang, C. S. 2015. The 1st POMS Applied Research Challenge 2014 awards. Production
and Operations Management 24(3) 359368.
Cohen, D. J. 2007. The very separate worlds of academic and practitioner publications in human
resource management: Reasons for the divide and concrete solutions for bridging the gap.
Academy of Management Journal 50(5) 10131019.
Cohen, M.A. 2015. Wharton Service Supply Chain Thought Leaders Forum. Accessible at
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/fd/forum (accessed July 2015).
Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER). 2015a. 2015 COER conference
agenda. Available at http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2015-coer/Pages/default.aspx
(accessed July 2015).
Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing (COER). 2015b. The Fishman-Davidson
Center for Service and Operations Management at The Wharton School. Available at
http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/fd/partnerships.php#coer (accessed August 2015).

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

33

Corbett, C. J., L. N. Van Wassenhove. 1993. The natural drift: What happened to operations
research? Operations Research 41(4) 625640.
Daft, R. L., A. Y. Lewin. 1990. Can organizational studies begin to break out of the normal
science straitjacket? An editorial essay. Organization Science 1(1) 19.
Denisi, A. S. 2010. Challenges and opportunities for the academy in the next decade. Academy of
Management Review 35(2) 190201.
Emerald Group. 2014. How to... write for a practitioner audience. Emerald Group Publishing
Limited. Available at
http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/authors/guides/write/practitioner.htm.
Fisher, M. L. 2007a. Bob Hayes: Forty years of leading operations management into uncharted
waters. Production and Operations Management 16(2) 159168.
Fisher, M. L. 2007b. Strengthening the empirical base of operations management. Manufacturing
& Service Operations Management 9(4) 368382.
Gallien, J. 2013. Motivating research through industry interaction. Proceedings of the Utah
Winter Operations Conference. Available at
http://org.business.utah.edu/opsconf/?q=node/43.
Gallien, J., S. C. Graves, A. Scheller-Wolf. 2016. Practice-based research in operations
management: What it is, why do it, related challenges, and how to overcome them.
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 18(1) 514.
Gallien, J., A. Scheller-Wolf. 2013. Call for papersProposal for an M&SOM special issue on
practice-focused research. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 15(2) 12.
Graves, S. C. 2009. A letter from the editor. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
11(1) 13.
Gulati, R. 2007. Tent poles, tribalism, and boundary spanning: The rigor-relevance debate in
management. Academy of Management Journal 50(4) 775782.
Hall, J. R., S. W. Hess. 1978. OR/MS: Dead or dying? RX for survival. Interfaces 8(3) 4244.
Hambrick, D. C. 1994. 1993 presidential address: What if the academy actually mattered?
Academy of Management Review 19(1) 1116.
Harvard Business School (HBS). 2008. Transparency and Accountability: The Role of
Information Disclosure workshop. Available at
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2008-transparency-andaccountability/Pages/agenda.aspx
Harvard Business School (HBS). 2015. Research on Effective Government: Inspection and
Compliance Workshop. Available at http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2015-researchon-effective-government/Pages/default.aspx (accessed January 2016).
Hayes, R. H. 1998. Developing POM faculty for the 21st century. Production and Operations
Management 7(2) 9498.
Hayes, R. H. 2000. Towards a new architecture for POM. Production and Operations
Management 9(2) 105110.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

34

Hoffman, A. J. 2015. Isolated scholars: Making bricks, not shaping policy. Chronicle of Higher
Education, Feb. 9.
Hoffman, A. J. 2016. Reflections: Academias emerging crisis of relevance and the consequent
role of the engaged scholar. Journal of Change Management. Forthcoming.
Hoffman, A.J., K. Ashworth, C. Dwelle, P. Goldberg, A. Henderson, L. Merlin, Y. Muzyrya, N.J. Simon, V. Taylor, C. Weisheit, S. Wilson. 2015. Academic Engagement in Public and
Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting. Michigan Publishing, Ann Arbor,
MI.
Khurana, R. 2007. From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American
Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Leopold Leadership Program. 2016. Fellowship overview.
http://leopoldleadership.stanford.edu/fellowship-information.
M&SOM. 2016. The M&SOM Practice-Based Research Competition: A biannual practice-based
paper competition for the M&SOM journal.
http://pubsonline.informs.org/page/msom/practice-based-research-competition.
Maryland Center for Economics and Policy (MCEP). 2015. Research on Effective Government:
Inspection and Compliance Workshop. Available at http://mcep.umd.edu/event/researcheffective-government-inspection-and-compliance-workshop/ (accessed January 2016).
Mowday, R. T. 1997. Reaffirming our scholarly values. Academy of Management Review 22(2)
335345.
Nicolai, A., D. Seidl. 2010. Thats relevant! Different forms of practical relevance in
management science. Organization Studies 31(09-10) 12571285.
Norden, P. V. 1970. A message from the president. Interfaces 1(1) 1.
OHara, C. 2014. How to improve your business writing. Harvard Business Review digital
article, November 20. Available at https://hbr.org/2014/11/how-to-improve-your-businesswriting.
Panda, A., R. K. Gupta. 2014. Making academic research more relevant: A few suggestions.
IIMB Management Review 26(3) 156169.
Pinker, S. 2014. Why academics stink at writing. Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 26.
Semadeni, M., Withers, M. C., Certo, S. T. 2014. The Perils of Endogeneity and Instrumental
Variables in Strategy Research: Understanding through Simulations. Strategic Management
Journal 35(7) 10701079
Singhal, K., M. S. Sodhi, C. S. Tang. 2014. POMS initiatives for promoting practice-driven
research and research-influenced practice. Production and Operations Management 23(5)
725727.
Smith B., N. Baron, C. English, H. Galindo, E. Goldman, K. McLeod, M. Miner, E. Neeley.
2013. COMPASS: Navigating the rules of scientific engagement. PLoS Biology 11(4)
e1001552.

Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

35

SupplyChainOpz. 2014. SCM Global 100: Best supply chain blogs in the world.
http://www.supplychainopz.com/2014/03/scm.html (accessed January 2016).
SupplyChainOpz. 2016. Blogroll. http://www.supplychainopz.com/p/blogroll_6.html (accessed
January 2016).
Tang, C. 2014. Welcome to MSOM review. Available at https://www.informs.org/Blogs/MSOM-Blogs/M-SOM-Review/Welcome-to-MSOM-Review.
Thomas, K. W., W. G. Tymon, Jr. 1982. Necessary properties of relevant research: Lessons from
recent criticisms of the organizational sciences. Academy of Management Review 7(3) 345
352.
Tushman, M. L., C. A. I. OReilly. 2007. Research and relevance: Implications of Pasteurs
quadrant for doctoral programs and faculty development. Academy of Management Journal
50(4) 769774.
Van Mieghem, J. A. 2013. Three Rs of operations management: Research, relevance, and
rewards. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 15(1) 25.
Vermeulen, F. 2005. On rigor and relevance: Fostering dialectic progress in management
research. Academy of Management Journal 48(6) 978982.
Vizecky, K., O. El-Gayar. 2011. Increasing research relevance in DSS: Looking forward by
reflecting on 40 years of progress. Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference
on System Sciences, 19.
Walsh, J. P. 2011. 2010. Embracing the sacred in our secular scholarly world. Academy of
Management Review 36(2) 215234.
Wein, L. M. 2009. Homeland security: From mathematical models to policy implementation:
The 2008 Philip McCord Morse Lecture. Operations Research 57(4) 801811.
Woolsey, R. E. D. 2003 Real World Operations Research: The Woolsey Papers. Lionheart
Publishing, Marietta, Georgia.