Teaching-practice as a critical bridge for narrowing the research-practice gap

Management researchers and management practitioners increasingly appear to be talking past each other. A solution lies in understanding that interactive management education has an important role to play in bridging this divide, but for some reason this mode of academic exchange is often forgotten. Our paper broadens the stakeholder value perspective to explore how and why the interests of researchers and practitioners have diverged, before going on to present illustrative cases of programs attempting to bridge such differences. Current conditions suggest that the dissonance between different cycle-times of research and practice is not sustainable with the inevitable outcome of a shrinking commons. Generating new knowledge and propagating it rapidly through education and teaching-practice is an important way of disseminating higher-order research and findings. In a world where academic relevance is under threat, enabling academics to better cross such a divide is critical. Marketing-management researchers and teachers ironically have their own challenge of taking what can be a complex theory (the marketing academic equivalent of a “sausage”) and making it “sizzle”.