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Many academics have raised concerns about the growing divide between academia and practice. While more collaborative research has been called for there is a lack of research into the actual practice of academic/practitioner engagement. This research aims to explore the application of strategic management theory and the role of universities in exchanging strategic management knowledge to practice.

In depth interviews were undertaken with practitioners, academics and experts in order to get a balance of views from different perspectives.

Organizations seem to have absorbed standard, iconic strategy techniques and are not, generally, relying on academia for new insights. On the academic side there is some uncertainty about what industry “needs”. The transfer of new strategy approaches can only be achieved once practitioners acknowledge the credibility of academia in contributing to practitioner related issues.

For academics to have credibility with practitioners the context and content of collaborations need to be more proactively managed through more effective processes. The context relates to understanding the operating environment that the firm is in and how the firm's goals and objective are aligned with that environment. The content refers to the program of research or action areas selected as part of the collaboration framework. The process refers to how the collaboration is handled.

The research takes up the challenge of exploring how academics and practitioners in strategic management can work more effectively together in order to apply the latest strategic thinking to the real‐life complexities of the contemporary business world.

This paper seeks to investigate what the marketing field can learn, with regard to the academic/practitioner divide, from other management disciplines that have a range of different relationships with their respective practitioners.

The authors carried out 68 interviews of academics, practitioners and experts/consultants involved in academic/practitioner engagement from the marketing, accountancy, strategic management and organisation studies disciplines.

The most interesting aspects relate to two areas: exclusive engagement (as exemplified in accountancy) versus inclusive engagement (as exemplified in strategic management), and the practices associated with participative research (as exemplified in organisation studies). The appropriate approach to engagement will depend on the nature of the relationship between the academic field and its particular community of practitioners.

The research is limited to academics, practitioners and experts/consultants operating from the UK. However, the findings on the challenges of engagement are consistent with those reported in the extant literature.

The first implication relates to defining what we mean when we talk about “practice”. The literature is often vague with regard to this. Does it relate to functional professionals or a far wider group of non‐specialists? A useful starting point might be to conduct an audit to clarify where aspects of marketing theory are relevant. The second implication relates to what needs to be done to engage with non‐inclusive groups of practitioners. Some conditions required for success are outlined.

The paper explores a knowledge gap in relation to the practice of engagement. It identifies why it is important to debate the nature of the practitioner community, and provides some guidelines for effective engagement.

To demonstrate how applied projects integrated within master’s level graduate programs in the organizational sciences provide students with experiences that facilitate the translation of classroom concepts into practices that positively impact individual, organizational, and societal level outcomes.

We discuss how the scientist-practitioner model guides our thinking regarding the development of cocurriculum options for master’s level students. To give context, we provide thumbnail sketches of two applied programs — a master’s of science degree program in industrial-organizational psychology and a master’s of business administration (MBA) program — that serve as exemplars for linking practice with science.

We demonstrated, with specific examples, how practicum courses can bridge curricular and cocurricular offerings in stand-alone master’s programs, thus offering a glimpse into the range of activities completed by master’s students with little to over 20 years of work experience: job analysis, interview protocol development, program evaluation, talent acquisition, performance management, coaching, as well as training strategy ideation and delivery. We conclude the chapter with final reflections on the use of practicum classes in master’s level training.

The practicum courses detailed serve as unique exemplars of how to apply theory and research to organizational problems, thus bridging science and practice in the organizational sciences.

The issues associated with the production and dissemination of management research have been widely debated amongst administrators, scholars and policymakers for decades. However, few studies to date have examined this issue at the level of the individual scholar. The purpose of this paper is to view a management scholar’s choice of knowledge dissemination (KD) outlets as a legitimacy judgment embedded in their social structure and community norms.

To explore this, the authors conduct a sequential mixed-methods study. The study uses qualitative methods, including one-on-one interviews (n=29) and five workshops (n=79) with administrators, management scholars, students and external community members (practitioners and policymakers). In addition, the authors analyzed the KD outcomes of 524 management scholars at seven Canadian universities drawn from a stratified sample of business schools.

The results of the research demonstrate the complex interaction between individual scholar-level factors, including socialization (degree type and practitioner experience) and tenure, and the institutional-level factors, such as strategic orientation and accreditation, and how these influence KD judgments. Specifically, the authors find that institutional factors (such as tenure and promotion) are a central predictor of scholarly KD; in contrast, the authors find that individual-level factors including degree, professional experience and career stage influence non-scholarly KD.

The results suggest that as management scholars face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact beyond academia, it may be more difficult than simply adapting the reward system. Specifically, the authors suggest that administrators and policymakers will have to consider individual factors, including their academic training (including interdisciplinary training), previous practitioner experience and career stage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the major determinants that influence the management teachers to practice management consulting. The second objective of this research is to understand how the experience in management consultancy leads to value addition in their class room teaching.

To address the first research objective, focus group discussions were conducted with management teachers practicing consultancy. These results were used to generate items for the questionnaire. Factor analysis performed on the data revealed six determinants influencing management teachers to engage in consulting activity. To address the second research objective, focus group discussions with MBA graduates were used to comprehend how teachers with management consulting experience enrich the pedagogy.

The major findings of the study suggest that the determinants influencing management teachers to practice consulting are: improving competencies, furthering professional advancement, accruing strategic and financial benefit, enabling holistic development. Through study 2, the authors found out that management teachers add value in pedagogy by forging corporate world connection through real-time examples, enable critical thinking by breaking established paradigms, effective classroom delivery through storytelling, etc., and lending student support by assuming a mentor’s role.

This study found that faculty consulting reduces the perceived gap between the industry and academia and it also leads to effective class room teaching.

The study is the first attempt to empirically test the determinants influencing management teachers to practice consultancy services and qualitatively assess how the consultancy experience enriches the in-class performance.

Strategic management scholars seek to link strategic factors to performance. When specific causal links cannot be identified, however, other potential explanations should be considered, including the notion of luck. This paper aims to introduce a distinction between scholarly and practitioner perspectives of luck and identifies why this distinction is critical to both scholars and practitioners.

This paper proposes a framework linking luck and competitive advantage. It also reports the results of an exploratory empirical investigation on the perceived role of luck in firm performance.

Scholars and practitioners have different views of luck's role in organizational performance. Managers are more likely to assign luck for bad outcomes rather than good. In addition, the more quantitative a manager's work function, the less likely he or she is to perceive a luck‐performance linkage, and the higher the manager is in the organization, the more likely he or she is to perceive luck as affecting outcomes.

There are a number of reasons why luck should receive prominence when considering the strategy‐performance relationship: many of the linkages between strategic factors and performance are identified after the fact – they are viewed as causal when they were actually lucky; empirical research may identify relationships whether they actually exist; researchers tend to find what they are looking for; and academics will be more likely to explain “luck” if they are using the appropriate tools to reveal it.

The positive link between management level and luck's role in performance identified in this study suggests that the more a manager knows about a firm's resources and attributes, the more likely he or she is to downplay the role they actually play in performance. From this perspective, managers seem more willing to acknowledge the role played by luck as they progress into greater levels of responsibility and control.

A significant portion of empirical work seeks to explain differences in performance across organizations by identifying the links between various strategic factors and performance. Although this research has contributed much to the knowledge about the strategy‐performance nexus, it assumes that strategy‐performance linkages necessarily exist and that they can be readily identified. In other words, most scholarly work in this area is based on assumptions that minimize or preclude the role of luck or randomness in the determination of firm performance. Building on previous work, this paper adopts an alternative perspective on the strategy‐performance relationship, highlighting the often overlooked role of luck.