Quick Take

Why Retrofitting Research Impact Does Not Work

May 28, 2026

This week, AACSB and the Academy of Management convene their first-ever Research Impact Conference in Dublin. It comes on the heels of the release of the long-awaited Framework for Research Impact which was developed by their Global Research Impact Task Force. The timing matters. Business schools are under growing pressure to demonstrate that their research contributes not only to academic knowledge but to corporate practice, policy, and society.

The framework is a serious and welcome attempt to respond to that pressure. The final report recognizes that research impact is a team sport—very much in line with what the deans of Australian Business Schools had already put forward. But recognizing this is not the same as outlining a viable pathway for acting on it.

The framework makes a strong case for research that is designed around real-world questions, involves a range of stakeholders, and is evaluated by more than journal rankings alone. It recognizes that research can create value in many ways, shaping how companies operate, informing government policy, or changing how future managers are trained. These are important steps. Yet the framework still treats impact largely as something to be assessed after research is completed, a property of outputs and outcomes to be measured, demonstrated, and communicated. This is not the right starting point.

Research impact cannot be retrofitted. It has to be embedded from the beginning. Whether research will matter to practitioners, policymakers, or communities is not a question that can be answered after the fact, however sophisticated the assessment framework. It is determined, often irreversibly, at the earliest stages. It needs to consider how the research question is defined and with whom. Were relevant stakeholders engaged during the research process, not just consulted after publication? Is the final output written and disseminated in a format that practitioners can actually find useful?

Some universities have begun dedicating resources to impact assessment, commissioning retrospective evaluations of their research portfolios. The impulse is understandable, but the results are predictable: research designed purely for academic audiences reaches academic audiences. Communication strategies that are applied after the fact will not change that. Thus, retrospective impact strategies are largely cosmetic.

What is required is a fundamental shift in how research is conceived and conducted. This means three things.

First, it requires faculty diversity, understood as a genuine integration of traditional academics and more practice-oriented academics who bring real-world networks and questions into the research process. The AACSB framework acknowledges this, but the incentive systems within most business schools still work against it. The final report acknowledges the importance of diverse faculty collaboration, but treats it as one option among many, rather than a prerequisite for impact-driven research.

Second, it requires strong networks that connect researchers to the stakeholders whose challenges should be shaping research questions: companies, civil society organizations, policymakers, and communities. Research impact in business and human rights, for example, is only possible when researchers have the trust and proximity to what is actually happening on the ground. That trust is built over years and cannot be conjured at the dissemination stage.

Building those networks is not something individual schools can do alone. Organizations like the Global Business School Network (GBSN) have played a vital connecting role here, bringing together schools across very different contexts and creating the relationships that make genuine research collaboration possible.

Third, it requires publication outlets that support this kind of research, outlets that value relevance alongside rigor, and that are accessible to non-academic readers. Here, the news is discouraging. The modest attempts to create space for practice-oriented scholarship within mainstream journals are already under pressure. For example, the Journal of Business Ethics recently lost its place on the Financial Times 50 list, and MIT Sloan Management review was shuttered after 67 years, a development that sends exactly the wrong signal to junior faculty weighing the risks of pursuing impact-oriented research. When the gatekeepers of academic prestige penalize journals for reaching beyond their own community, the incentive to do so evaporates. Notably, the report is largely silent on publication strategy, leaving unchallenged the assumption that academic publication is the end goal of research rather than, in many cases, a byproduct of work that was designed for impact from the outset.

Some business school centers are modeling a different approach. One example is the work being done by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights. Both centers have built their research model around early engagement with companies, civil society, and policymakers to define questions that matter. They routinely publish their findings in formats that are designed to inform practice while at the same time advancing scholarship. There are a number of other examples as well that help illustrate that impact-oriented research is possible and effective.

The AACSB framework, in its final form, moves in the right direction. But it now needs to go further. If it stops short of addressing how research is conducted and focuses only on how it is assessed, it risks reinforcing the very patterns it seeks to change.