the relevance of knowledge management and intellectual capital research

Knowledge and Process Management

Volume 15 Number 4 pp 235–246 (2008)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

14
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.3
& Research Article

The Relevance of KnowledgeManagement and IntellectualCapital Research

Lorne D. Booker1*, Nick Bontis1 and Alexander Serenko2

1DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada2Faculty of Business Administration, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

*CorBusiE-ma

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In recent years, there has been a growing pressure on business schools to make their researchmore useful to practitioners. Consequently, the AASCB International dedicated an entire reportto the subject. In order to assess the relevance of knowledge management/intellectual capital(KM/IC) research, 12 semi-structured interviews were undertaken with KM/IC professionals.Based on the findings, a framework was constructed and eight implications were suggested.Overall, this study is the first documented attempt to empirically investigate the issue ofrelevance of KM/IC academic output. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTRODUCTION AND LITERATUREREVIEW

We all know based on our common sense and experiencethat at least 80% of all management research is useless.

Leif EdvinssonWorld’s First Chief Knowledge OfficerMcMaster World Congress on Intellectual Capitaland Innovation, January 21, 2005

The field of knowledge management/intellectualcapital (KM/IC) is alluring to both practitioners andacademics (Nonaka and Peltokorpi, 2006), but is ituseful? The purpose of this paper is to assess therelevance of academic research in this field. In orderto perform this assessment, the relevant literaturewas reviewed and semi-structured interviews wereconducted with 12 KM/IC professionals.

The discussion of academic research relevance isa long-standing tradition in scientific circles

respondence to: Lorne D. Booker, DeGroote School ofness, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.il: [email protected]

yright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

(Ruback and Innes, 1988). For business schools,the public debate can be identified as beginningin 1959 when the Ford and Carnegie reportstriggered a fixation with rigorous research. Later,in 1990, a BusinessWeek article questioned whetheracademic research meets the needs of practitioners(Byrne, 1990). This article captured the attention ofthe business community (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005)and even some renowned scholars started ques-tioning the applicability of academic findings. Thiscriticism of business academic research is men-tioned in various business domains such as generalmanagement (Starkey andMadan, 2001), marketing(Ankers and Brennan, 2002; Varadarajan, 2003),strategy (Bailey and Ford, 1996; Gopinath andHoffman, 1995; McGahan, 2007; Shrivastava, 1987),information systems (Anandarajan and Lippert,2006; Baskerville and Wood-Harper, 1996; Benbasatand Zmud, 1999; Breu and Peppard, 2003), indus-trial and organizational psychology (Andersonet al., 2001; Rynes et al., 2001), and internationalbusiness (Daniels, 1991). There have been specialjournal issues (e.g., see Baskerville andMyers, 2004;Gray, 2001; Lee, 2001) and conference panels (e.g.,

RESEARCH ARTICLE Knowledge and Process Management

see Kock et al., 2002) that are totally devoted to thistopic.

For business disciplines, the debate calls intoquestion the purpose of business schools (Grey,2001). If the difference between professional schoolsanddisciplines basedonpure sciences is in their outputthen the objective of business schools is to informcurrent practice and educate future managers. Withregards to research, the goal is to create knowledge thatmanagers may utilize to advance practice. There areclaims that business schools are failing in both goals(Bennis and O’Toole, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005).

Only a small number of researchers have studiedthe relevance problem empirically. However, eventhese studies do not form a coherent program ofinquiry. For example, Duncan (1974) discoveredsubstantial disagreement between researchers andpractitioners on the academic knowledge utilizationprocess. Ankers and Brennan (2002) reported thatmarketing managers knew very little about the stateof research and claimed that academics did notunderstand business realities. Pearson et al. (2005)observed that the academic field of informationsystems did not have much impact on the state ofpractice. At the same time, Baldridge et al. (2004)demonstrated that there is a positive relationshipbetween the academic quality and practicalrelevance of academic publications which showsthe possibility of producing rigorous and highlyrelevant research output. Therefore, there is a needfor more empirically based research in the discus-sion of academic relevance.

Currently, KM/IC is in its embryonic stages ofdevelopment but it grows at an accelerated rate(Bontis, 1999, 2001; Serenko and Bontis, 2004). It hasa number of characteristics of a scientific field. Forexample, it can boast its own journal ranking system(Serenko and Bontis, 2009), theories (Serenko et al.,2007), and scientometric studies (Gu, 2004a,b;Harman and Koohang, 2005; Ponzi, 2002). At thesame time, KM/IC is a practice-driven disciplinewith many practitioners contributing to the body ofknowledge and many academics actively partici-pating in commercial and government projects. Forinstance, case studies are the most frequentlyemployed methodology of KM/IC researchers. InKM/IC, the scholarly contribution of practitionersis higher than that in other management domains(Serenko et al., 2008). KM/IC is a very attractivesubject for business students (Bontis et al., 2006,2007). In the past, it has been demonstrated that theapplication of KM/IC practices has a positiveimpact on the performance of organizations (Bontis,2002; Bontis and Serenko, 2007; Choo and Bontis,2002) and their organizational learning capabilities(Bontis et al., 2002). Hence, it is crucial to form the

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foundation for research outcomes that are alignedwith the needs of practitioners.

After an extensive literature search of all majorindices (e.g., ProQuest, ScienceDirect, Emerald,etc.), major conference proceedings and onlineresources, we found no study that empiricallyinvestigated this issue except for a brief discussionby Bailey and Clarke (2000, 2001), the theoreticalinsights by Andriessen (2004), and elaboration byFerguson (2005). Overall, prior works concludedthat it is important to empirically investigate theissue of the relevance of KM/IC academic output.

Before the problem of academic relevance can besolved, the problem has to be defined and rootcauses have to be identified. Yet, there is littleagreement regarding how the relevance problemshould be defined or framed. The problem has beenviewed as a difference in culture between academicsand practitioners (Barley et al., 1988), as a linkingprocess among scholars (Daniels, 1991), as aknowledge transfer problem (Rynes et al., 2001),as theory-practice linkage issue (Tenkasi and Hay,2004), and as a paradigm clash (Gulati, 2007). Noneof these perspectives have been embraced as theaccepted standard. In this study, the ‘‘relevanceproblem’’ or the ‘‘managerial relevance of scholarlyresearch’’ is defined as the degree to whichacademic theory influences industry practices. Itis acknowledged that there are various definitionsand conceptualizations of research processes andtheir effects on the society (Kuhn, 1962). In thisproject, we only concentrate on the extent to whichscientific research in the KM/IC domain generatesprescriptions, makes recommendations, offerssolutions, and develops principles that are actuallyapplied by KM/IC professionals. Throughout theproject, the underlying objective is to clarify whatwe term the ‘‘relevance problem’’ and to empiricallyidentify its root causes.

As a first attempt toward this goal, the purpose ofthis study is to develop a theoretical framework thatexplicates the phenomenon. In the future, thisframework may be empirically tested through asurvey of KM/IC practitioners by using quantitat-ive methods that will allow formulating furtherpractical recommendations for scholars, businessprofessionals, and journal editors, who wish todevelop, disseminate, and apply highly relevantacademic research.

METHODOLOGY

In order to better define the relevance problem,12 semi-structured interviews with KM/IC prac-titioners frompublic (eight participants) and private

L. D. Booker, N. Bontis and A. SerenkoDOI: 10.1002/kpm

Knowledge and Process Management RESEARCH ARTICLE

(four participants) Canadian and US organizationswere conducted. Interviewswere undertaken over a3-month period; eight were conducted face-to-face,three over the phone, and one electronically. Aninitial list of interviewees was obtained by con-ducting a search on the Government of Canada’semployee directory utilizing the job title ‘‘knowl-edge.’’ Google was employed using variations ofsearch terms such as ‘‘knowledge management’’and ‘‘consultant.’’ Researchers also approachedseveral KM/IC managers they knew personally.A snowballing sampling method was thenemployed; early interviewees were asked to recom-mend their colleagues who could be potentiallyinterviewed. Most of the approached professionalsagreed to participate in the study; this produced theresponse rate of over 60%. Each interview lastedapproximately 1 hour.

In order to develop a list of questions, acomprehensive literature review was conducted.We were unable to identify prior empirical studiesof academic relevance in the field of KM/IC.However, a number of dimensions of relevancewere identified from other management fields and aseries of questions were devised to capture eachdimension. The questions were reviewed byindependent KM/IC experts, and their feedbackwas utilized to revise the initial instrument. Aftereach interview, modifications to the questions weremade based on the subjects’ responses to bettercover the phenomenon under investigation. Forexample, the researchers continuously incorporatedcomments made in previous interviews to expandon interesting or promising avenues of discussion.On one occasion, two interviewees were emailedadditional questions and asked to comment on theinsights gathered from a later interview.

Each interview was transcribed into NVivo andsubjected to qualitative data analysis by two coders(Miles and Huberman, 1994). The interpretiveparadigmwas followed during the analysis process.The coding scheme evolved as the researchersanalyzed the interviews. As patterns emerged,previous interviews were revisited and some nodeswere recoded.

FINDINGS AND SUGGESTEDFRAMEWORK

One way of characterizing a problem is that itrepresents a gap between an actual and a desiredstate of affairs.While coding the interviews, we keptthe goal of clarifying the problem of academicrelevance in mind. As key themes evolved, the

The Relevance of KM and IC ResearchDOI: 10.1002/kpm

framework indicated below emerged. The frame-work describes how academic output is actuallygenerated. It then outlines what practitioners needand expect from scientific research.

At the heart of this framework are twokey players: researchers and practitioners. Theresearcher undertakes scientific investigations inorder to create and validate theory. Practitionersseek to obtain competitive advantage throughincreased productivity. There is an expectation thatresearchers would produce knowledge that isdirectly useful to practitioners, but that is not whatalways happens. The framework provides a repres-entation of the barriers to the effective productionand dissemination of academic knowledge. Theframework is presented in Figure 1.

In the following section the needs of practitionerswill be contrasted with the attributes of academicpublications. The differences that are revealed as aresult of this comparison form the basis of ouranalysis of the ‘‘relevance problem.’’ The researcherand factors that influence him/her are examined inorder to clarify how research topics are chosen.Subsequently, knowledge dissemination processesare described and assumptions regarding theseprocesses are examined.

Attributes of academic publications

In this section, we discuss the attributes of academicpublications and the articulation of knowledge. Wealso report on those attributes and articulationprocesses from the practitioner perspective. Thepurpose is to identify a number of factors associatedwith academic publications and their distributionprocesses.

The key finding about the knowledge manage-ment practitioners is that they have an immenseworkload. As a result, they cannot afford the luxuryof reading and interpreting lengthy academicpublications. While scientists need to report theirfindings in meticulous detail, the respondents wereunanimous in asserting that they do not have timeto read extensive academic articles. The sentence andpaper structure represent a problem. Some managersbelieved their organizations do not have a need forknowledge, whereas some just need a quick fix and areadily accessible solution:

‘‘I just haven’t got the. . . you know. . . I get hundredsof emails every day.’’

‘‘No one has time to read! These are busy people. Dothey have time to sit down and first of all find researchthat is relevant and read it? Absolutely not!’’

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Figure 1 KM/IC research relevance framework


‘‘I do think that there’s another issue there in terms ofthe length of the articles.’’

In addition to paper length, the respondentsindicated that they had problems with the style ofacademic thinking and writing. Academics arefixated with contributing to academic theory. Theyseek universal laws and conclusions with highgeneralizability. They communicate their findings at ahigh level of theoretical abstraction. Practitioners, incontrast, need information that is instruction based,concrete, customized, and context-specific (Aramand Salipante, 2003). As a result, most respondentsreported a large gap between academic findings andtheir actual applications:

‘‘There is a gap—at least in the KM field—betweentheory and practice. That gap needs to be filled.’’

‘‘I’m constantly being told by practitioners that theyare not interested in theory. I’m constantly being toldby theorists that they are not really interested in thepractice side.’’

‘‘The academic research comes from a totally differentcontext. So, trying to apply it into a differentcontext. . . it may just not work. It is really, reallytough for a regular practitioner to take the stuff andconvert it into something useful for the organization.’’

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‘‘But it has also got to be taken with some context and
it has got to be used with care because it is notnecessarily going to be grounded in insights that aregoing to be applicable to the new context.’’
Practitioners envision academic results presentedin a format that is easy to read and interpret. Thisconflicts with academic needs. Academics need tobe precise in their use of language. They speak ina specialized language of statistics, validity,reliability, and generalizability. In fact, the hallmarkof a well-developed discipline is the existence of aproprietary language. The respondents stated thatthe use of language, jargon, or words was an issue inKM/IC research and described the researchlanguage as ‘‘exclusive,’’ ‘‘dense,’’ ‘‘obtuse,’’ and‘‘inaccessible.’’ Most practitioners do not have theeducational background or the ability to understandacademic output:

‘‘You often think ‘this is written by a Ph.D. guy.Maybe I’m not supposed to understand it’.’’

‘‘I see that very often around me where people don’tunderstand a lot of the articles or the way that it iscommunicated.’’

‘‘I don’t think that it is necessarily hard to understand.I think that the problem in my view is that a lot ofpeople don’t have the background to understand it. So,



if you don’t have the background, very often if you arereading something and you don’t have some basicunderstanding of statistics or how things work thenyou won’t understand it.’’

‘‘There are some research pieces that I haveintellectually been challenged very very much to tryto understand because it is very scientific notation,and I know there is value there but again it isappropriating that value.’’

A large part of the relevance issue then is an issueof communication. The intended audience of aca-demic publication is other academics. Researcherswrite to meet the needs of the academic community,not the needs of practitioners. What we have is afailure to communicate. Some practitioners feelacademic works not geared toward industryprofessionals and ignore them:

‘‘The readers of academic papers are academics.’’

‘‘I realize that they write for other researchers, but theyhave to understand that there are tons and tons ofpeople who are not researchers themselves who will bereading this. Do you really want to exclude them fromthat?’’

However, the problem of academic relevance ismore than just a communication issue. Although anumber of factors influence the practitioners’assessments of academic conclusions, a few standout. Academic findings must have novelty andnonoviousness. Practitioners favor research thatchallenges existing theory or practice (Baldridgeet al., 2004), provides counterintuitive insights(McGahan, 2007), or identifies emerging trends orstructural changes (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999).Professionals do not value research findings that aretrivial (Shrivastava, 1987).

That feature must be balanced against credibility.In this paper, we define credible research findings asbeing aligned with knowledge that practitionershave acquired through experience. It is usefulfor academic findings to challenge conventionalwisdom, but they cannot depart entirely fromthe practitioner’s general body of knowledge:

‘‘The bottom line is a lot of them [academic articles] areabout simple common sense. So, if you just stop tothink about a knowledge issue in a very serious way fora period of time, then you are going to come to a lot ofthe same conclusions.’’

‘‘I remember in some instances where I would readthrough the abstract and then say okay yeah, thatseems to be interesting, there seems to be new


information there that I would be interested inreading it, but in most cases it tended to be things Ialready knew.’’

We also inquired about operational validity. To berelevant, a practitioner needs to be able to takeacademic findings and apply them. Consistent withprior research (Ankers and Brennan, 2002), mostrespondents said that they could not translateacademic recommendations into reality eitherbecause they included factors beyond their controlor they ignored the constraints of real worldsettings. When asked if they ever successfullyimplemented an academic recommendation froma refereed article, the universal and adamantresponse was ‘‘no.’’ In fact, many respondentslaughed at this question. They also indicated thatuseful recommendations need to be expressed as aset of execution steps; this supports Breu andPeppard’s (2003) suggestion that practitioners valueprocedural knowledge. Currently, very few aca-demic recommendations can be directly used bypractitioners:

‘‘I can’t think of any case where in a specific contextwhere people have been guided by some specific set of[academic] recommendations.’’

‘‘Very often in the research that I see real constraintsare not taken into account.’’

‘‘I hate to use the word naıve—but they’re moresimplistic—the recommendations. They are a bitidealistic. The reality is far from that, I’m afraid.’’

‘‘I have been influenced by academic journals, but haveI gone from reading an academic journal to launchinga project to affect change? No.’’

‘‘At the end of the day it is not necessarily about theresearch, it is about how I can apply it. So, very often, Iwould find myself in that position where I would readsomething and say yeah, what am I supposed to dowith this? A lot of it also would just give you some biggrandiose theory and not necessarily really give youany idea about the practical application of it.’’

It is also important for managers to be able toobserve and measure the outcomes of their efforts.Ideally, results should be linked to financial out-comes. For those reasons, impact measurement is afeature of research topics that will be of interest topractitioners. The lack of procedural knowledge,and the lack of measurable outcomes linked tofinancial resultsmake it hard to sell KM/IC researchto practitioners:

‘‘We are interested in outcomes. We are interested inhow we are going to meet our goals and objectives.

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How does knowledge management affect the bottomline? What is the return on investment?’’

‘‘Justifying KM expenditure is a big issue.’’

‘‘There is a tremendous push-back in the knowledgemanagement field for these kinds of metrics, largelybecause it is very difficult to take what we do andconnect it directly to the bottom line.’’

Another problem is that academics and prac-titioners work on different timeframes (Anandar-ajan and Lippert, 2006). Managerial issues arecharacterized by a sense of urgency. It is usuallybetter for managers tomake decisions quickly basedon the information available at the time. Academicissues are governed by other priorities. Scholarsrigorously examine phenomena, follow strict pro-tocols, and seek accurate information. Discoveriesthat come too late are not helpful to practitionersand solutions to problems that have already beensolved run the risk of being labeled as obvious.Timeliness of academic research affects relevance:

‘‘It is often difficult to find something that is bothrelevant and current.’’

‘‘So, if academia is going to think about anything to dowith technology the rate has to be speeded up.Behaviorist issues would be different.’’

‘‘We’re dealing with an environment where change isthe order of the day. You’ve got technology change,organizational change, operational change, marketchanges, all happening in tandem. So, the problem isthat when an academic researcher, for example, writesa case or findings related to some research. Sometimesthe problem that exists is like the driver looking in therear-view-mirror.’’

Timing affects some topics more than others.Obsolescence is an issue for research that relates totechnological issues such as information systemsand KM software. However, research related tohuman conduct is timeless. So, the timeliness ofknowledge management research can be dividedinto two categories: technological issues, andbehavioral issues. The longevity of research is afactor of the topic covered. Articles that addresstopics of enduring interest to practitioners will bealways well received (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999).

The academic timeline is different in other waysas well. Sometimes, academics address issues thathave no immediate application. The application forthe research may not be found for decades—wellbeyond the current business horizon (Weinberg,2001):

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‘‘It might be something that they discover or formulate[something] that might not be applied for ten, fifteen ortwenty years.’’

‘‘Trade magazines give you something that has moreimmediate value . . .academic material may be longer-term material.’’

Timing affects relevance in another way. Everyorganization has a history and culture. Peopleprefer to continue doing things the way that theyhave always done them. A young field such as KM/IC has to overcome a barrier of inertia. A fewrespondents indicated that there is a resistance toKM/IC research because it is difficult to changeorganizational management practices. Knowledgemanagement researchers have to overcome thisproblem of inertia if their work is to be adopted byand become relevant to practitioners.

Another set of features that is worth consider-ation is the practitioner’s awareness of knowledgemarkets. Many managers are only aware of books,trade publications, and some industry conferences.For those who know, the ability to access knowledgemarkets is limited to trade publications and con-ferences. Academic journals are expensive to access.Most businesses cannot justify the cost. Academicoutput may lose relevance by virtue of beinginaccessible. Also, while journal titles add atremendous weight to perceived credibility andimpact of an article in academia, practitioners rarelypay attention to journal names. It may be a packagingissue. To practitioners, all journals look alike.Practitioners search for articles based on topics orkeywords as they are needed. They generallynever read specific academic journals on a regularbasis:

‘‘You want to know what the source was but once youknew it was a credible source you’d forget it.’’

‘‘I’m more interested in the article than in the journalthat it came from. So, I could have well seen materialfrom those journals but it wouldn’t click.’’

Despite these complaints, several intervieweesdiscouraged academics from changing academicpapers. Instead, there should be another version ofeach paper, or a meta-analysis article summarizingthe key points, offering concrete recommendationsand expressing the key ideas in a simple language.The key requirement is to contextualize the researchand to turn it into something that is more actionable.A more common comment was to describe bridgingmechanisms that translate academic works into amore comprehensible form. Currently, it is still rarefor academics to write for both audiences and some



specific translation mechanisms should be estab-lished:

‘‘It [academic writing style] is very appropriate for theacademic world. I certainly would not dumb-downacademic work. There just needs to be another versionfor those who aren’t going to read the academic reportbut actually are the ones who need the information.’’

At the same time, despite their somewhatpessimistic tone when talking about the issue,respondents confirmed that the key factor thatmotivated them to read the literature was the searchfor ‘‘golden nuggets’’—those novel ideas or keyinsights that challenge or change the way that theysee things. In fact, most interviewees believed thatthe KM/IC academic body of knowledge is veryuseful in general, but it was simply difficult for themto access this knowledge by reading scientificarticles:

‘‘What I have found that there are those what I callnuggets—that is what I always look for is that nugget,that key insight that I as a reader can actually buildupon. . . that nugget might be a conclusion or adifferent way of looking at things...’’

Researcher and influencing factors

The researcher is the central component of thesuggested framework. The motivation of researchersis to gain recognition of their research expertisewithin their own research communities. Academicswant to be noticed and recognized by theiracademic peers, not by industry professionals,therefore, they neglect the practical impact of theirresearch. Researchers attempt to gain respect,mobility, visibility, and bargaining power bydemonstrating high-volume research output. Thegoal becomes to publish as much as possible on thetopics and in outlets valued by other scholars:

‘‘If an academic success is based on academicpublications only, academia is missing the wholepoint.’’

‘‘I think that in some respects may be the problem isthat the emphasis is on publication.’’

‘‘They [academics] need to get a number of papersbecause they want to make themselves look good.’’

Another objective is to be first to establish a theoryor line of research:

‘‘Part of the game in academia is to get published first.You want to be the first one out there with that idea.So, there is this whole thing to get recognized as theoriginator of the idea.’’


Related to motivation, and yet distinct from it, isthe scholar’s research objective. Some academicspublish because they want to meet college/univer-sity requirements for tenure and promotion. Inother circumstances, they are guided by the schoolresearch agenda, the priorities of granting agencies, oreven the preferences of influential colleagues. At amore subtle level, the norms and conventions ofacademia and the power structures within univer-sities influence the scholar’s research objectives(Benbasat and Zmud, 1999). Academic recognitionis often more important than the creation ofbusiness value:

‘‘[Academic research is] geared for academic recog-nition vs. business value.’’

‘‘Some of it is going to be really useful stuff and someof it is just going to be I need to get a book out to getsome visibility, or I need to get a paper out so I can bevisible.’’

Academic training, prior industry exposure, andcurrent industry involvement form the awareness ofbusiness reality that, in turn, shape the direction ofscholarly research. Several respondents stated that,in extreme cases, some researchers had strongscholarly training but little, if any, prior or currentindustry experience. As a result, their research washighly theoretical with no applicable managerialinsights:

‘‘Most academics have not worked in business so theirlens of reality is less relevant and judgments toextrapolate context often missing.’’

Overall, the respondents’ opinions diverged. Onone hand, they indicated that there are manyacademics who have excellent industry experience,who understand the needs of practice and whoseresearch has significant practical contributions. Onthe other hand, many said that academics oftenhave little management experience, lack the tacitknowledge that can best be learned on-the-job, andmany scholars’ output has no merit whatsoeverfrom their perspective.

Academic outlets

The primary channel for publishing the outcomes ofacademic research is peer-reviewed journals, books,book chapters, and conference proceedings. Thesechannels are controlled by gatekeepers such as editorsand reviewers who serve to legitimize academicoutput (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999) and labelresearch as rigorous or non-rigorous (Gulati,2007). Editors often constrain content or demandfundamental changes to papers (De Rond and

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Miller, 2005). In some cases, senior researchers advisetheir junior colleagues on specific outlets. Tenure andpromotion committees play an important role in someinstitutions by establishing a list of approvedacademic journals thereby forcing all facultymembers to investigate topics favored by thoseoutlets. Overall, by controlling critical resources,these powerful figures influence the direction thatresearch takes more strongly than the curiosity ofthe researcher (Barley et al., 1988).

Knowledge market, contextualization,and conversion

In the literature, discussions of academic relevancehave been based on a set of assumptions andimplicit arguments. First, most practitioners do notread scientific papers. The implicit argument is thatif practitioners do not read scientific papers then theresearch is not relevant. Second, it is assumed thatthe only channel of distribution for research findingsis through academic publications. Several respon-dents challenged that position. They indicated thatindirect channels of knowledge dissemination canoften be more influential for practitioners. Forexample, academics present papers at conferencesthat practitioners attend. Consultants utilize aca-demic knowledge in the tools and reports that theydevelop. Think tanks and policy research centersmake use of it. New knowledge gets incorporatedinto classes, workshops, and textbooks. It disseminatesthrough direct interaction between academics andpractitioners. It can also disseminate through word-of-mouth discussion among practitioners. Whensomething works, word gets around. Pearsonet al. (2005) recommended that future researchersexamine these indirect distribution channels whenstudying relevance. Therefore, the key ‘‘researchrelevance’’ question is not whether academic dis-coveries are getting disseminated to practitioners.The right question is how they are getting dis-seminated. The path of dissemination may not bebased on direct causation but rather throughindirect influence. Learning is a social process(Jensen, 2005). Scholars tend to favor direct causalrelationships, but knowledge dissemination doesnot work like an assembly line. Instead, it is like anecosystem diffusing knowledge at the societal leveland delivering it to decision makers through theknowledge market. Also, prior work on relevancehas assumed that it is the individual practitionerwho utilizes research. In fact, it may be the learningorganization, learning network (Kiely and Armis-tead, 2005), or community of practice that utilizesthe research:

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‘‘But they [managers] are not going to go read theliterature and that is what we really need to question ishow managers access research, not if the research isrelevant but how they access it.’’

‘‘. . .the final product might not come from theacademics. . . It might go through several intermedi-aries that take some of the ideas and adjust it for theclientele. . . So, it might have to go through thatrefinement process or productization process before itis actually finally usable.’’

‘‘As well, the intermediaries, if any, in the dissemina-tion process between researcher and end-customer arealso ecosystems in their own right, as well asparticipants in a ‘distribution’ ecosystem with acomplex set of interactions and influences from a widevariety of sources.’’

The knowledge created by researchers may beincompatible with the learning processes or knowl-edge stocks of practitioners (Mork et al., 2008). Atranslation process is needed to make abstracttheoretical material accessible. Often that involvessummarizing long articles into a shorter version oraggregating the results of a line of research into asingle narrative. Meta-analyses are useful becausethey aggregate entire research streams. They allowpractitioners to understand research and its out-comes very quickly. Academic works may reachpractitioners directly or through a conversionmechanism:

‘‘There’s the question of how we translate this[academic articles] into reality. I saw people strug-gling with it.’’

‘‘That is where the translation is so enormouslydifficult.’’

‘‘I think it would be important to not only just reducethe size of the paper to a quick read but also to translateinto common knowledge so that it doesn’t read like anacademic paper.’’

‘‘It is always a challenge to take that stuff and try totranslate that into something that is actionable.’’

Contextualization appears to be an important partof the translation processes. Academic findings arereported as theoretical abstractions. Yet, it is thecontext that it is important to managers. Managerswant real-world examples written for their indus-try. They need solutions, not abstractions. Thisrelates to the need for procedural knowledge andpractical execution steps mentioned earlier:

‘‘Research is missing the context.’’


RESEARCH ARTICLE

‘‘So, it [research] is useful. But it has also got to be
taken with some context.’’
‘‘In order to affect the specific work, they are going togive them a context.’’

While discussing indirect channels, an idea of aknowledge market emerged. This market servesfunctions similar to the traditional market bymatching buyers with sellers, facilitating theexchange of information, goods, services, andpayments, and providing a regulatory framework(Yannis, 1998). The same roles are filled. There areproviders of knowledge and users of knowledge.While academics can use academic output directly,market intermediaries serve familiar roles ofmatching, repackaging, and redistribution—mak-ing academic findings available to practitioners.Desouza et al.’s (2005) ideas about the knowledgemarket, and Easton’s (2007) narrower view of amarket for academic articles apply here. They haveimplications for the discussion of academicrelevance:

‘‘Somebody other than the academic needs to take this[task of synthesizing and translating] on.’’

It is important to remember that the knowledgemarket is a two-way street. Knowledge gets passedin both directions. Although practitioners can learnfrom direct interaction with academics, thatrelationship is probably of more value to thescholar. Many papers on relevance conclude byencouraging academics to seek out closer associ-ations with practitioners. Closer interactions havebeen put forward as a way to break down thecultural barrier between academics and prac-titioners (Beyer, 1997). It has even been stated thatunless academics interact with practitioners, there isno way their research can be relevant (Ankers andBrennan, 2002). Unsolicited comments in theinterviews extolled the virtue of these interactions.Overall, itwas concluded that translationmechanismsand functional knowledge markets are necessary.

Knowledge and Process Management

Implications and conclusion

The purpose of this paper has been to assess therelevance of research in the knowledge manage-ment and intellectual capital fields, to clarify therelevance problem and to empirically identify itsroot causes. For this, 12 semi-structured interviewswith industry professionals were conducted. Basedon this, a framework explicating the relevance ofKM/IC academic research was developed. Eightimplications are offered:


Implication #1: There is a disconnect between KM/ICtheory and practiceCurrently, there is a substantial gap between thestate of KM/IC theory and the practical applicationsof academic findings. Overall, this is similar toconclusions reached in other management fields(Ankers and Brennan, 2002; Anandarajan andLippert, 2006; Kernick, 2005; Rynes et al., 2001). Interms of a direct incorporation of scientific findingsin everyday decision making processes, the situ-ationwithin the KM/IC discipline is similar to thosewithin other business domains. Currently, KM/ICpractitioners rarely read papers in academic peer-reviewed journals.

Implication #2: KM/IC practitioners perceive thescholarly body of knowledge as very usefulOn one hand, practitioners believe that manyacademic publications have no merit whatsoever.Some academics have insufficient, if any, industryexposure. Their research objective is a publicationitself rather than its practical contribution. Toadvance their careers, scholars often have toinvestigate topics favored by their senior colleagues,institutions, sponsors, or government grantingagencies. Each paper needs to be approved byreviewers and editors who are mostly otheracademics rather than industry professionals. Over-all, these factors dramatically reduce the value of thefinal manuscript to practitioners.

On the other hand, practitioners believe that theoverall scholarly body of knowledge in KM/IC isvery relevant, and it would have a significantimpact on their practices if utilized effectively. Forexample, many of them frequently search throughpeer-reviewed publications looking for ‘‘goldennuggets’’—bits and pieces of vital knowledge theycan utilize in decisionmaking. Overall, practitionersbelieve that there is current, relevant and usefulknowledge in academic outlets; they just cannotfind an efficient way to consume it. It is more of acommunication gap than a relevance gap.

Implication #3: KM/IC academic articles are not in aform that is directly suitable for practitionersOne of the main objectives of this study was toclarify the problem of academic relevance. A largepart of the problem resides in a communication gapbetween researchers and practitioners. The majorityof works published in peer-reviewed journals aretargeted to other academics. Papers are written in aspecific scientific language, contain jargon, words,phrases, and are structured in a way that non-academics cannot quickly comprehend.Many of theproblems that practitioners have with scientificpapers is not with the ideas that are expressed, it is

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with the way that they are presented. Mostacademics offer a set of practical insights at theend of their manuscripts. However, this is notsufficient to allow industry professionals to directlyconsume the body of academic knowledge. As such,the direct knowledge distribution model, in whichpractitioners are supposed to read academic articlesand utilize their practical insights, completelyfailed.

Implication #4: Indirect knowledge distribution chan-nels have an important role to play in knowledgedisseminationThe KM/IC academic body of knowledge should bedelivered to practitioners through indirect distri-bution channels. During a conversion process,entire streams of research should be summarizedand presented in a form that may be easily digestedby a busy professional who does not have ascientific expertise in the area. Traditionally,researchers study phenomena meticulously andreport their findings accurately. If an objective ofresearch is to communicate findings directly topractitioners then that role is not being met. In fact,the purpose of academic publications has neverbeen to communicate directly with practitioners. Ifscholarly research should be made available to non-academic consumers, it needs to be transformedand delivered through indirect channels. It isbelieved that this is the most efficient approach tobridge the gap between academia and practice.

Implication #5: Knowledge markets can provide inter-mediation between academics and practitionersKnowledge markets serve as an intermediarybetween academics and practitioners. They offertwo types of knowledge: direct, such as academicpublications, and indirect, such as transformed,aggregated, and translated material. The knowl-edge market may have various knowledgeexchange facilitators, for example, consultantsand academics, and instruments, such as books,conferences, and workshops. It is where prac-titioners may quickly find solutions to theirproblems, and those solutions may be based onacademic research to some extent.

Implication #6: There is a need for further research intoknowledge distribution processesIn the past, the majority of projects concentratedon the issue of relevance of academic research.Instead, knowledge distribution channels andprocesses should be investigated. First, it is unlikelythat academics are going the change the way theywrite scientific articles. In fact, they do not need to.Each peer-reviewed paper should be detailed

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enough to encourage future inquiries. Second, theoverall scholarly body of knowledge is useful butcannot be consumed directly. Therefore, the point isnot whether academic research is relevant. Instead,the right question is how this knowledge isdistributed.

Implication #7: Journal branding and positioning arenot important for practitionersJournal name is of high importance to academicswho prefer to publish their works in themost highlyranked outlet available for the topic. More scholarlycredibility is given to articles appearing in leadingjournals. In contrast, practitioners pay no attentionto journal names. In fact, they search for steams ofresearch and solutions. This fact needs to beconsidered by publishers in their journal promotioncampaigns.

Implication #8: The provision of practical implementa-tions steps and impact measurement approaches facil-itates the transfer of knowledge from researchers topractitionersAs a short-term solution to improve the attractive-ness of academic works to practitioners, it issuggested that researchers provide not only a setof practical recommendations, but also concreteimplementation steps and impact measurementapproaches. Managers have no time to think aboutthe actual implementation of academic recommen-dations. They also need to be able to observe theoutcomes to justify their investment; otherwise theyare less likely to attempt to implement academicrecommendations.

This project is the first attempt to empiricallyinvestigate the issue of the relevance of KM/ICresearch and to propose a framework explicatingthis phenomenon. Overall, it is concluded that thefocus of future investigations should shift from thetopic of research relevance to the issue of findingsdissemination. Specifically, the role of indirectknowledge distribution channels should beexplored in detail.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research project was sponsored with a grant from theMcMaster University Incentive Fund #5-29064.

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