Matt Symonds wrote a thought-provoking article for Forbes.com last week, questioning the necessity of b-schools’ academic research. Like many businesses and institutions, b-schools are looking for ways to cut costs in the current economy; given the expense of conducting research, it seems like an obvious place to trim. Symonds quotes Mauro Guillen, the director of Wharton’s Lauder Institute:
If you add up the cost of faculty time, of research assistants and administrative staff, of producing and purchasing data and of surveys and the expenses involved in publication, you’ll find that somewhere between a third and a half of our total budget is directly related to research activity.
Not only is research expensive, it didn’t foresee the crisis
Yet so far, most schools have not touched their research budgets. This leads Symonds to question the research’s practical use. After all, little of it forewarned of the economic crisis, and the professors conducting the research might have suffered the same cloudy judgments as the rest of the financial world. As Guillen explains, “Our graduates were benefiting from the strong market, and consequently we didn’t allocate enough resources to foreseeing the crisis. What was needed was more informed research and policymaking.”
Why B-school research matters
Symonds allows b-school professors and associates to have their say in the article as well, and they come up with some compelling reasons to keep up with academic research:
- 1. Faculty who are collecting up-to-date data about on-going issues make better teachers.
- 2. If schools stopped conducting research, insight and new perspectives would be lost.
- 3. Learning the importance of research teaches students that their management practices should be based on evidence, not anecdote or opinion.
Symonds concludes that while b-school research could have done more to counter the “relentless optimism of the pre-downturn years,” it still has an important future. He writes:
At least [b-schools'] insistence on keeping up on research and disseminating it to students and the wider world suggests that they’re determined not to fall into such a trap [of missing signs of the downturn] again — and that is surely good both for future MBAs and for the business world as a whole.
How important do you think b-school research is? Does the research coming out of b-schools serve you in your career?
Book stack image courtesy of Flickr user Trinity, CC 2.0
