Paper Series

Making management research matter: A Dean’s reflection on translation, diffusion, crossover, and ROI

15 September 2026

Varun Nagaraj

Abstract

Business schools devote a substantial share of their resources to research, yet struggle to demonstrate that management scholarship shapes practice rather than merely describing it. Citation counts and altmetrics capture academic and digital attention, but not whether research changes what organisations do. Claims that research enriches teaching cannot by themselves justify the investment. This paper argues that a central justification for management research is its capacity to alter the trajectories of industries, firms, and policies. It develops a framework around three concepts. Translation Readiness is an ex-ante standard, operationalised through SPJIMR’s Research Impact Assessment Instrument, for assessing whether research is designed from the outset to travel into practice across nine impact dimensions. Diffusion Vectors describe how scholarly ideas enter practice, illustrated through concepts such as the value chain, disruptive innovation, and psychological safety. Verified Crossover focuses on establishing whether such influence has actually occurred. The paper proposes methods including text-mining of corporate filings, tracking practitioner channels, and auditing AI knowledge-retrieval systems to examine whether research leads or follows changes in practice. It concludes by outlining the roles of deans, journal editors, methods scholars, and accreditation bodies in making the real-world influence of management research easier to design for, trace, and verify.

Keywords: Management research, research impact, translation readiness, diffusion vectors, verified crossover, knowledge translation, research diffusion, research ROI, management practice, business schools, AACSB, EQUIS

Note: This paper is being circulated as a working paper. A version of the paper is being considered for publication in practitioner-oriented management education outlets.

Suggested Citation:

Nagaraj, V. (2026). Making Management Research Matter: A Dean’s Reflection on Translation, Diffusion, Crossover, and ROI. Working Paper, SPJIMR Paper Series, WP-2026-14. S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR). https://www.spjimr.org/paperseries/wp-2026-14/

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