The Supply Chain of Research (Part I)

A couple of years ago, a doctoral candidate at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, Daniel Gruber, published a short, but excellent, interview that he conducted with Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker journalist (Journal of Management Inquiry, December 2006). In the interview, Gruber and Gladwell discuss the simplifier and synthesizer functions that Gladwell uses to pursue his goal of getting non-academics excited about the “academic study of ideas.” While many academics publish insightful, but nevertheless often technical and dry, papers, Gladwell makes the insights more accessible by finding and telling compelling stories which draw people in to listen.

Gladwell’s responses in the interview provide some reassurance to those people (like me) who find themselves in the spaces and places in-between academia and the broader popular public sphere. Think tanks and journalists are the two most prominent examples of in-between institutions and individuals that I can think of off-hand, but there are others. The work performed by these intermediaries in interpreting and making sense of the basic and applied research done in universities constitutes a critical function in what one professor at the Ross School – Andrew Hoffman – calls the supply chain of research:

Basic research supports applied research, which supports policy development, which supports managerial change, and so on. The links and ties in this chain are many and diverse, all of which lead to change within the world of some form of practice. (Hoffman, JMI, 2006: 411).

(For the record, Hoffman does not think that the work of translation, interpretation or sense-making should be left to others. Academics who produce research should simply learn how to convey their findings to broader lay audiences).

Setting aside Hoffman’s call for all academics to take on the heroic task of communicating their findings to a popular audience (which would likely distract from their real strengths), there may be a need for institutional innovations which would strengthen the “links and ties” in the supply chain. Let’s face it: With few exceptions, policy-makers and business leaders simply don’t read long, complicated, jargon-laden papers for insights that they can apply to their crafts. If a message is to reach and persuade them, it has to be written in a style they’ll understand. And, for academics, the tenure incentive structure encourages a writing style which uses the technical, almost impenetrable, language of disciplinary journals. We might lament these facts (as I often do) and we might do what we can to change them, but for the time being, they are the demands of realism to which we must, at least temporarily, reconcile ourselves.

With that in mind, universities, granting institutions, governments and businesses should explore, and get serious about long-term funding for, other ways through which links and ties in the supply chain of research can be created and strengthened. In the area of business, management and organization studies, for example, there are promising models of knowledge translation and diffusion in the form of journals written in more accessible language – such as the Harvard Business Review – and a growing trend towards on-campus press offices which attempt to make academic research more understandable and widely disseminated to a lay audience.

In Canada, while the granting institutions (such as CFI and SSHRC) have adopted the language of “knowledge translation” and “knowledge transfer,” it remains to be seen how much those institutions will supplement funding for conventional academic research with funding for experiments in knowledge translation and diffusion. In addition to supporting HBR-type initiatives and press offices, granting institutions (and universities for that matter) might want to consider strengthening and expanding writer-in-residence programs where the writer-in-residence takes on the role of better understanding and then translating the research done in the institution/department for a broader audience. And recognizing my conflict of interest here, improved support for partnerships between non-profit think tanks and certain media organizations and journalists, might also lead to better diffusion of the research produced in universities across the country.

Then again, maybe James March was onto something when he asserted in (of all things) an HBR interview that there should be better support for irrelevant ideas. My own education and academic experience as a political philosopher has given me a great appreciation for the intrinsic merit and beauty of (irrelevant) ideas. But I still think my roommate at MIT was onto something when he said that you should be able to explain your research to three kinds of audiences – your advisor (in 20 minutes); a non-expert, but educated, audience (in 10 minutes); and the unfortunate guy sitting next to you at the local pub (in 5 minutes, or the time it takes him to down his pint and move on to something else).