How can research drive meaningful impact? This central question guided the 2024 PhD Sustainability Academy, co-hosted by Ivey Business School and the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS). On November 22, 2024, the Academy convened scholars, faculty, and PhD students to tackle critical social and environmental challenges through an engaging Q&A panel focused on research impact.
Panel pictured from left to right: Daniel Arenas Vives (Universitat Ramon Llull), Kate Odziemkowska (University of Toronto), Pablo Munoz (Durham University), Sharon Alvarez (University of Pittsburgh), Charles H. Cho (York University), Oana Branzei (Moderator, Ivey Business School), Simon Pek (University of Victoria) and Anna Kim (McGill University).
In their blog below, Ivey PhD students Michelina Aguanno and Valen Boyd, reflect on the panel.
Michelina Aguanno and Valen Boyd, Ivey PhD candidates
During the panel discussion, faculty members were asked to share how impact shows up in their work. Despite coming from different disciplines, including entrepreneurship, strategy, accounting, and sustainability, each panel participant considered impact an important aspect of their work.
At business schools, there are multiple audiences for impact, including students, managers, and policy makers. Each faculty member shared their perspective on how they achieve impact for each of these communities. They spoke about two ways in which business school faculty can have impact: by doing good research and by making it accessible in practice.
First, doing good research was described as producing knowledge that matters. Several of the faculty members emphasized that impact shows up throughout the research process, beginning with the selection of important research topics, such as problems that matter to communities and problems that have important welfare implications. Impact is also imbued into the research process through the ways in which researchers engage with communities by listening, collecting, and amplifying stories, and ensuring give-back to the communities with which they are engaged. Other faculty spotlighted the importance of upholding the standards of rigorous research to ensure the quality of the knowledge produced.
Making Knowledge Accessible in Practice
Second, impact occurs through disseminating knowledge and making it accessible in practice. Metrics such as citation counts and impact factors do not measure the impacts on the multiple audiences that business school faculty engage with, most notably students, executives, and policy makers. In addition to better forms of impact measurement in academia, some faculty shared the importance of making knowledge applicable in practice. Since every organization and community is different, part of impact is ensuring that knowledge is adapted and applied appropriately within practical contexts. One faculty member suggested working with practitioners to best understand how knowledge can be applied within their contexts.
Collaboration as the Heart of Impact
Another key message shared by the panelist was that impact is not a lone endeavor. Rather, all knowledge comes from the organizations and communities with whom one engages, and the role of a researcher is to listen to stories, synthesize learnings, and share back. Impact is not achieved through one research paper, but rather through a community of scholars that collectively act as thought leaders and knowledge share in partnership with communities, managers, students, policy makers, and other academics.
Overall, the panelists left the audience with the message that impactful research does not separate knowledge production from practice but instead requires close engagement with practice as core to developing good research that matters.
The PhD Sustainability Academy remains one of the premier learning and networking events for PhD students dedicated to advancing research on social and environmental issues.
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