Translating Research Into Teaching

At any business school worth its salt, one of the most important goals is to
foster an environment of successful academic research. This is especially
true at research-intensive business schools where a core of solid, productive
researchers leads to recognition and ranking among the top institutions. The
Financial Times’ Business School Rankings and Bloomberg Business Week’s
Best B-Schools Ranking are among the most well known. A select number of
business schools, about 1 percent in total, are triple accredited with accredita-
tions from AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS. This scholarly recognition attracts
not only undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to achieve their
full potential by acquiring the necessary capabilities and skills to manage and
accelerate their career in business, but also PhD students eager to establish
careers in a strong research environment.
Business schools have long had their research quality assessed. For
example, in the United Kingdom (UK), the impact assessment evaluation of
higher education institutions’ research is the Research Excellence Framework,
which is the successor to the Research Assessment Exercise. These impact
assessment evaluations provide benchmarking information according to which
UK business schools (and other higher education institutions) are ranked (see,
for example, The Guardian and Times Higher Education). Highly ranked
business schools (i.e., schools conducting world-leading research in terms of
originality, significance, and rigor) use this information unashamedly when
seeking to attract the best talent, be it researchers or students.
With the Research Excellence Framework and its predecessor Research
Assessment Exercise putting much emphasis on higher education institutions’
research, there has been an increasing realization that it also is important to
evaluate institutions’ teaching. The UK government introduced a Teaching
Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework in 2017. Although participation in the exercise is voluntary, most UK colleges and universities have chosen to
participate. An institution with gold status delivers consistently outstanding
teaching, learning, and outcomes for its students. At research-intensive busi-
ness schools, the aim of the research strategy therefore should be to conduct
demonstrably impactful research that influences society, can be deployed
usefully in developing education, and can be communicated to and used by
practitioners. Fulfilling this aim starts with publishing research with a high
impact, which is then adopted for teaching.
In order to stay competitive, business school leaders would like to recruit
and keep the top research talent, attract high-potential students, and hire the
most promising young faculty. To accomplish these objectives, a successful
research environment for its business academic researchers needs to be estab-
lished so that these researchers can produce a sustainable stream of high-quality
research. In a recent editorial (Lindgreen et al., 2019), we examined important
antecedents of establishing successful research groups, including business
school research strategy, leadership, and governance; from these antecedents,
we developed a set of conditions that are related to long-term success of
research programs in academic business institutions. As detailed illustra-
tions, we elaborated the experiences of two active research institutions—the
Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group and the Contemporary Marketing
Practices (CMP) Group—and discussed how each of these groups has imple-
mented the conditions for success. We concluded our editorial with general
observations on the environmental conditions most conducive to sustainable
business school research, and presented implications regarding the role of the
journal editor as a gatekeeper.
Building on our past editorial, we now examine how business schools con-
tribute to education by translating their great research into great teaching for
graduate business-to-business marketing classes (including MBA programs
with such classes). To achieve this goal, the remaining parts of this chapter
are organized as follows. First, we present some of the most recent findings
on teaching excellence, which pertains to business instructors as well as to
academics in general. Next, we explore the specific opportunities and respon-
sibilities facing the business-to-business marketing academic. We then discuss
the process by which business-to-business marketing academics can transform
their research in meaningful ways and deliver value to their practitioner audi-
ence in the classroom.