Business school research: bridging the gap between producers and consumers

There has been a great deal of continuing discussion concerning the seemingly unbridgeable gap between so much of the research produced by business school professors and the needs of the business people who, ideally, would use it. Here, we examine this gap and suggest a model for bridging it. We sample four groups of people, business school academics (professors), deans of business schools, executive MBA students/recent graduates, and senior business executives. Each group rates 44 different (potential) properties of exemplary research. We analyze within-group differences, and more meaningfully, between-group differences. We then offer commentary on the results and use the results to develop the aforementioned suggestions for bridging the gap we find. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.