Producing Useful Knowledge in Management Science—Facilitators and Barriers

In many conferences and meetings in management subjects today, some academic scholars blame themselves and their academic societies for not producing useful research. Here, usefulness refers to the type of a research that can be useful in real practice and lead to the improvement of organizations. Since the gap between academic research and industry practices has increased in recent years, there is a need to shed light on the causes of this issue and propose ways in which this challenge can be overcome. This is a critical step in enhancing applied science. This article analyzes the current trend in conducting management research and raises some issues that scholars should consider when implementing research to make their results practical. To this end, it utilizes institutional theory and introduces factors, which are mostly institutional, that needed to be considered in managerial studies in order to contribute to the practice. It introduces the factors which facilitate or impede producing useful knowledge. Additionally this article illustrates a network of academic researchers linked to industry and shows how the structural holes in the networks of academic scholars and industry can contribute to producing useful knowledge. The model of producing useful knowledge is proposed and the relationship between different methods of conducting research and the usefulness of the created knowledge for practitioners is illustrated in this paper.