Carlson School professor reveals the possibilities of collaboration between business and academia

In his 2007 book Engaged Scholarship, Carlson School professor Andrew Van de Ven suggests that differences between business practitioners and academics actually hold solutions for big problems.

“One perspective will always do you in,” says Van de Ven, holder of the Vernon H. Heath Chair of Organizational Innovation and Change. “Big research questions tend to reside in a buzzing, blooming, confusing world. They can’t be solved by one way of thinking.”

Van de Ven advocates engaged scholarship, a form of research that obtains the different perspectives of academics, business practitioners, clients, and other stakeholders. “When this happens,” Van de Ven says, “it expands our capacity to expand knowledge.”

In the trenches

Academics and practitioners rarely see eye to eye because, simply put, they live in different worlds and know different things. Business people tend to develop deep knowledge of particular situations, based on their experiences. Through on-the-ground experiences, they learn solutions that work in specific instances. They solve problems, cut costs, and make other bottom-line decisions.

But the knowledge—and the problems—of a business owner or executive aren’t necessarily representative of trends. They might be a bad or good manager, or have excellent business partners, or be in debt, or be locked into punishing contracts, or get labor at cost. Their knowledge, in other words, is based on their experience, and this means that it is at least to some degree specific, rather than general. This kind of knowledge is important, but it differs fundamentally from the kind of knowledge that academics develop.

On the other hand, academics build theoretical knowledge based on research, which tends to yield broad answers, rather than specific ones. Often, they seek broad trends and patterns that allow the formulation of theories about even broader topics. They deal in abstractions and generalities, in large amounts of data rather than single instances.

In these terms, the specific knowledge of a practitioner and the broad knowledge of a researcher can seem so different that it’s hard to understand how they can affect each other. To Van de Ven, this is when it gets exciting.

Engaged scholarship

Van de Ven envisions a situation in which scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders together research the topic. He advocates for engaged scholarship, in which a scholar develops a research study of a complex problem in the world that will advance both theory and practice. Engaged scholarship is the very opposite of the ivory-tower mentality that can leave business practitioners scratching their heads.

“By involving others and leveraging their different kinds of knowledge, engaged scholarship can produce knowledge that is more penetrating and insightful than when scholars or practitioners work on the problem alone,” he writes.

Such an approach could lead to answering what Van de Ven terms “big questions.” After all, the big questions are tough to answer and the immediate rewards for answering them are few.

By doing research in a way that reflects our complicated world, we might just get a little closer to understanding big problems in a way that can produce serious, important knowledge for academics, business practitioners, and everyone else.

Who knows? We might just uncover the meaning of life.