How does academic research increase the relevance and create value in businesses and education?

I think of academic research as diamond mining, you have to move tons of dirt to find a few rough ones, and once discovered they have to be skilfully polished. The story does not end there, they have to be marketed properly and eventually liked by the customer. Did this process add value? I am sure you see the analogy I am drawing here. With no academic research there would be no gene therapy and no wireless modems :)) In fact I applied my research to develop an iApp that people from over 30 countries continue to download. It even created business for 2 corporate lawyers, a webhosting company, my tax attorney, dev and design work... Cheers!

I cannot help feeling that most businesses ignore research completely. The ones that do not, have a wealth of either free, or very cheap research available, making money out of it, without any return or recognition to the researchers or the institutions they work for.

The gap which we find in academic research and its application, is because of the reach. The academic research remains (mostly) in the libraries. Academicians rarely try to relate it with industry on their own. Similarly, industrialists, on their own, do not come to the academicians for applying the research. In the question of Who's first ?, the research remains academic research without its application.

Tha gap between research and business value creation is due to the lack of interest of academics to work in solving real or daily problems on one hand and the prevention from Business People towards what they usually do not fully understand..

And the gap between research and value creation in Education is in my point of view, due to a general lack of prestigie of teachers in the social pyramid, and therefore the effort of bringing the researchs tools and results has no social pay-off, in a matter of speaking.

And by transition, since education do not incorporate researchs in its core, the future degree holders and managers to come do not even think on closing the gap between research and business...

An additional point is the incentive structure for academics vs practitioners. Under the "publish or perish" regime it is wise to go with the herd and publish academic pieces. These academic pieces follow an increasing escalation in that the refine arguments, reach more and more abstraction and generalization etc.

Practitioners are not paid for general insight but for making profit to say it very broadly. So we have two rather incompatible incentive structures. It is in my opinion not ill-suited minds or characters it is just the system that drives the two "worlds" apart.

So change the incentives and academics will do more for business.

Well, sounds easier said than done

I think of expert opinion because we don’t want to and don’t have time to conduct research on everything, people frequently rely on expert opinion as they learn about the world. Note, however, that if

you rely on an expert’s opinion it is important to make sure that the expert is an expert in the specific area under discussion and you should check to see if the expert has a vested interest in the issue.

I recently left academia for private practice, and have found that academic research is frequently of value to me. Legal-academic research is the starting place for me when I need to learn a new area of law, or want an in-depth analysis of a particular issue, or need to mine case references. Articles in economics, mathematics, and various scientific fields are incredibly useful to me in patent litigation. Academics also construct datasets that professionals sometimes use for preliminary models, investigating whether it is even profitable to pursue better data.

When I was doing research at Oxford in the 160s the motivation was to understand why things are the way they are and how they got to be that way. My D.Phil. was done under Edward Abraham who was one of the younger members of the team that produced therapeutic quantities of penicillin during WW2. Money was never a motive.

The process was taken to the USA because we didn't have the capacity in the UK.

10 years later he isolated cephalosporin C - active against Gram-negative bacteria, patented by NRDC. He personally made £150 million but gave it all away to the University. If you start doing academic research to make money and throw away your sense of curiosity you will probably make no money and contribute little to the sum of human knowledge - which is the true aim of academic research.

I am an admirer of several things that Margaret Thatcher did - not least her defeat of Trade Union Power, which took immense political courage and determination. New Union leaders are trying reverse them but they seem to have lost touch with reality. The aphorism "Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle" originates in American political debate but often perfectly represents the sound of Trade Unionist voices. Nevertheless we have to balance that against her conviction that business was everything and that the sole purpose of education was to prepare children for work, a mantra that now persists across large parts of the political spectrum. Naturally she thought that academic research should also serve the business community. She also saw the International Development Budget as a means to support British companies by supplying British equipment, irrespective of whether it was necessary or suitable. Much of her privatisation programme was a success but some was a mistake. As the saying goes "if you have a hammer, soon every problem looks like a nail". Returning to the original questions:

How does academic research increase the [its?] relevance [to] education? Quantum theory entered school curricula in the late 1950s when it was well enough understood to be able to be taught without the associated maths. You couldn't hurry the process along but the need to account for otherwise apparently arbitrary valence numbers was a powerful spur.. Relativity lacked this spur and came into he syllabus much later still. Business needs had nothing to do with it.

How does academic research create value [for] businesses? By accident

Do we have the incentives to do so in our current system? No - and just as well! If you need mathematicians and engineers you need very good and inspiring teachers and supportive parents, not more tests, more exams and annual reviews of the syllabus. Governments last 4-5 years if they're lucky. If the children are unlucky (as they are in the UK) they face a minimum of two major upheavals during their 13 school years and shifting university entrance goalposts. This depressing scenario will persist until education is taken out of politics.

I was an adjunct professor before I left to get my PhD. I felt i was a good teacher, and my students generally gave me good reviews. I believe, however, that my PhD and the research component that brought to my professional life has made me a better teacher. Now when I teach inventory, I also bring in the research on stock market reactions to companies that change to LIFO. Even though, in a period of rising prices, a change to LIFO reduces net income, it also increases share price because of the tax impact. I then relate this to the potential to switch to IFRS. I have done research in consolidations and accounting for goodwill and IPR&D. This also enhances my ability to teach these topics, both at the undergraduate and masters' levels. Rather than simply teaching how to account for goodwill, I can provide students with more insight into why it matters. I can also related stock market reactions, which tend to be positive, to both the write-off of IPR&D and the incurrence of higher than expected R&D and marketing costs. The market treats these charges "as if" they were assets, which is theoretically justified as they are thought to increase the company's ability to generate future cash inflows through higher future sales. By examining the literature on value relevance, one can even come up with average expected "lives" of such expenditures. My dissertation research was on the audit of bank loan portfolios and how aspects of the decision making process affect auditor judgments. I have used anecdotes from this research in my teaching ever since, especially how a bank loan officer responded to some of the information in the case when he helped me by reviewing the information that I was creating for my experiment.. I have just started doing research in corporate social responsibility and accountability, and this research stream led me to develop a new masters level course in accounting and CSR. These are just a few of the ways that research - both research I do and research others do - has had a strong positive influence on my teaching, and I believe I am a much stronger professor for the research experience.

Coupled with that is the fact that teaching has made me a better researcher. Using research in class enhances my ability to understand implications and nuances of research studies. Further, more than one research idea has been either generated or enhanced by class discussions. As I delve into CSR, the class discussions are particularly relevant in my developing understanding of CSR disclosures, how they are evolving, and how they might be used. I also teach International Accounting, and a component of that course is how cultural differences (i.e., Hofstede's cultural constructs) potentially influenced financial accounting disclosure. We are taking that construct and testing to see how cultural constructs shape CSR disclosures. I have also done cross-cultural research that examines issues like professional commitment. There is research on potential differences in audit programs as a function of cultural differences; I believe these differences potentially impact audit risk.

These are but a few examples of the synergies between research and teaching. From my experiences, I believe these synergies are very important, significantly enhancing both research and teaching, and creating a much richer teaching environment.

Academic research positions education givers for perpetual relevance. The dynamics in contemporary education demands that we regularly carry out research in order to be updated

Research compels you to review hitherto generated knowledge with the intention to add to existing knowledge. In due course engaging in research enhances your confidence and promotes the way you are perceived by your peers, the upcoming academics and professionals and other stakeholders in the areas of your research. Not surprisingly, even apparently average work attracts some reaction, which the researcher leverages upon to improve.