How do you persuade an academic whose success is largely measured by a portfolio of published articles in specialist journals to engage with the world beyond blue sky thinking? And how do you persuade a practitioner working in the world of business to collaborate with academia when their primary concern is the bottom line?

Much store is set by the idea of knowledge exchange highlighted by the Lambert Report (1993) that calls for industry and universities to work more closely together. All universities engage in what is known as the knowledge economy but recent research by business experts at the University of the West of England sets out to identify how to improve such engagement opportunities in the business and management field. 

Dr Tim Hughes from Bristol Business School, based at UWE, said, “We have looked in detail at the process that leads to successful knowledge exchange activity between academics and the business community and at some of the barriers that can prevent such activity from working. The project, ‘Academic/practitioner engagement in management: knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange’ sought to discover what processes work best. Our findings indicate that a key area rests with improving the ability of academics to identify areas for research that are of mutual interest for themselves and business people and then to be able to communicate findings and ideas in ways that are meaningful to a business audience. Currently the way that academic success is measured does little to encourage knowledge exchange activity as assessments like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) mean academics are encouraged to prioritise publication in specialist journals.

“The journals are seldom read by those outside the academic community. We need to think much more widely about how we disseminate findings in ways that are accessible and meaningful to business and management practitioners. This means looking at the full range of dissemination opportunities open to us and developing strategies to fully exploit these.”
“At the same time academics need to understand the needs of practitioner communities if the implications of their research are to be meaningfully presented and discussed. In particular, academics are far more likely to get support and access to practice in order to pursue their research if the subject matter has relevance to what is going on out there in the real world.”

The project team included Dr David Bence, Dr Louise Grisoni, Rebecca Hughes, Professor Nicholas O’Regan, Professor Alan Tapp and David Wornham from Bristol Business School who between them interviewed 62 respondents made up of academics, practitioners and other experts with relevant experience in the management field. The team investigated the range of potential routes for academic/practitioner engagement including courses and programmes, research, publication, conferences, knowledge networks and academic consultancy. They reviewed how each route works in practice and the conditions under which knowledge exchange is effective or not.

Their findings suggest that each route has its limitations and therefore effort needs to be put into developing a range of avenues for engagement to be effective. These often require skills not necessarily associated with the traditional academic such as that of building and maintaining a network across a number of communities or conducting consultancy where the academic engages with practitioners on equal footings and not as a ‘guru’. In some management fields knowledge exchange may be enhanced by the involvement of professional bodies or commercial consultants where they have active relationships with particular practitioner communities.

Dr Hughes concludes, “For this model to flourish academic institutions will need to encourage this wider activity and give it recognition equal to article publication and in turn government funding policy needs to adapt to enable universities to do this. What is needed for knowledge exchange activity to succeed is a fundamental culture change that recognises the activity as a valid component in an academic portfolio. While there has been some progress on this there is still a long way to go. Our research suggests that more organisations would contact and liaise with academia in the business and management field if they had a better understanding of what is available from universities and also if they believed that universities could relate to their ‘real world’ problems.”

Knowledge exchange with practitioner communities is a central part of the Bristol Business School’s strategy, as evidenced in the following recent examples:

• Expansion of postgraduate part-time courses to offer opportunities for those working full-time (example new Social Marketing and Marketing Communications MSc courses)
• The launch of a range of short executive courses designed to address specific contemporary business needs (example “Applying business thinking in the new NHS marketplace” aimed at Primary Care Trusts)
• The continued development of Knowledge Transfer projects and consultancy services utilising the collective experience and expertise of the Business School’s staff covering a comprehensive range of business disciplines

Professor Ian Gow, Executive Dean of Bristol Business School says: “This research is part of an active programme within Bristol Business School to enhance our engagement with practitioner communities. While we have already established many such mutually beneficial partnerships and initiatives there is still tremendous potential to develop many more across the private and public sectors. We hope that this research will help encourage academics and practitioners to fully exploit the opportunities from working more closely together.”

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