This chapter considers what leads to superior academic research groups. Business school leaders would like to attract and keep the top research talent in order to stay competitive, attract high-potential students, and recruit the most promising young faculty. To accomplish these objectives, a successful research environment for its business academic researchers needs to be established, so that they can produce a sustainable research stream. The authors examine important antecedents including business school research strategy, leadership, governance, and policy, and from these, they develop a set of conditions that are related to long-term success of research programs in academic business institution. As detailed illustrations, the authors elaborate the experiences of two active research institutions - the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group and the Contemporary Marketing Practices (CMP) Group - and discuss how each of these groups has implemented the conditions for success. The authors conclude with general observations on the environmental conditions most conducive to sustainable business school research, and present implications regarding the role of the journal editor as a gatekeeper.

This chapter offers a meta-perspective on the collaboration between university academics and business practitioners. While academics often intuitively and implicitly take an inside perspective, namely a university perspective, in discussing collaborative research and the why, how, and what in collaborating with practitioners, the authors bring to the fore an outside perspective, namely a business perspective, on the same collaboration, which then typically is termed collaborative innovation. Doing this gives the opportunity to mirror the two perspectives against each other and to discuss the differences, difficulties, and learning opportunities in the relationship between universities and businesses. The chapter offers a discussion of how academics can be inspired to engage better with practitioners.

At the same time as the productivity of academics have become more formalized and institutionalized with increasing emphasis on counting publications in high-ranking journals, citations, h-index, and so on, there is an increased demand on academics to contribute to what is referred to as societal value, societal relevance, public value, societal impact, and/or similar phenomena. This chapter is an attempt to provide an overview and hopefully a clarification. We propose to use the concept ‘societal value’ as the overarching concept. This can be achieved only if the research has ‘societal relevance’ and if it has ‘societal impact’. These two sub-components of societal value measure different qualities, but they are dependent on each other and the total absence of one of them results in no societal value. In fact, we shall argue that societal value is the multiplum of societal relevance and societal impact. After defining societal relevance and societal impact, we describe how to identify relevant societal value, as well as how to measure the extent to which an individual or an organization might contribute to societal value. Following that, we suggest a number of ways to increase the societal value of academic research. Finally, we reflect on the role of academic journals and their editors in the societal value agenda.

At any leading business school, 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 business schools. We examine how business schools contribute to education by translating their great research into great teaching for graduate business-to-business marketing classes (including MBA programs with such classes). 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 responsibilities facing the business-to-business marketing academic. We then discuss the process by which business-to-business marketing academics can transform our research in meaningful ways and deliver value to our practitioner audience in the classroom.