Incentivizing Research With Impact

• To show real impact, business schools must adopt new ways of measuring the value of research beyond scholarly publications.
• Encouraging research partnerships between disciplines can bridge expertise gaps and broaden the opportunities for applying new research findings.
• Tenure and promotion frameworks should align with research goals to make it easier for faculty to pursue collaborative and high-impact research initiatives.

Transcript

Brad Price: [00:15] I think business schools can foster a research culture that incentivizes impact. I think the incentives really come down to making an impact, because I think that’s how you will get researchers to understand what impact you’re looking for as an organization.

[00:29] Whether you want them out in the community working on societal problems, or you want them working on a specific type of technology problem—which is what we’re looking for in my case—or working with experiential learning problems with students, or whatever your organization is looking for.

[00:44] It comes down to what incentives you’re giving the researchers to find that problem. And I think that’s really what it comes down to. It’s a local solution to your business school, it’s a local solution to your organization, and it’s finding that alignment.

[00:57] It’s also about breaking down barriers inside your university and your school. So, if you want them to work on healthcare, if you want them to work on engineering, or help them find their interests, to allow for more collaborative environments, create a team science approach to these things.

Incentives really come down to making an impact, that’s how you will get researchers to understand what impact you’re looking for as an organization.

[01:11] I think all of those are ways to create more impactful and lasting outcomes in research.

Vera Blazevic: [01:17] Business schools could enable a research culture where teams really work better together and where it’s adhered to in the career trajectories that different profiles could make a particular position.

[01:29] I think they also really have to tell in terms of their models and visions and so on, that this is important, engaging with all the stakeholders, maybe fostering more interdisciplinary work. I see a lot of the societal challenges where we would like to have impact cannot be solved by one discipline alone.

[01:50] Still, it’s important to have a good stand for kind of in the discipline, but then to reach out and talk to other disciplines to really see how that works. So, in my work on technologies, digitalization, and generative AI, I work a lot with computer scientists simply to understand their domain.

It really helps to have those interdisciplinary, more cross-functional collaborations. And that’s something the business schools can encourage.

[02:09] And that’s so fruitful because in terms of the technology, they are obviously much further than I am. But then I can talk to them about how organizations can apply this in the real world.

[02:20] It really helps to have those interdisciplinary, more cross-functional collaborations. And that’s something the business schools can encourage by allowing us to reach out and promote interdisciplinary work.

[02:32] Again, interdisciplinary work is sometimes a bit harder to publish in top-quality journals, so account for that, and be OK with that. That has, again, an impact on the tenure requirements and all these things. There’re a lot of interconnections between all these things.

[02:47] If you want to foster such a research climate, you also have to make sure that the structures and incentives are in place.

Jennifer Griffith: [02:53] I think business schools could foster a culture that is really focused on research impact in meaningful ways by rewarding those projects and behaviors that faculty engage in not just through compensation, although, of course, that would be nice, but in terms of what the opportunities are provided at the business school itself.

[03:17] What sort of things do people get recognized for? What are the opportunities that are presented to faculty to work on these big challenging issues? Separated apart from things like, how many publications do you have, and where do they go.

[03:33] That’s an important part of our scholarship, of course, but it’s not the only thing. And I think we get wrapped up in that one piece and the incentive structures that we have in business schools, and it makes it difficult to think and break outside of that box.