How applied research can address real-world challenges and shape societal progress.
Management research has a relevance problem. The numbers are uncomfortable: fewer than one in five papers in leading management journals translate into practice that finance teams, technology leaders, or policy makers actually use. Most of the work is rigorous in the formal sense — the methods are sound, the peer review is honest — but it lives in a closed conversation. The result is a paradox: an explosion of research output, and a persistent gap between what we know and what we do.
Applied research is the discipline that closes that gap. It starts with a problem that an organisation, an industry, or a society is genuinely struggling with. It uses rigorous method, but the test of value is whether the finding makes its way into a decision, a system, or a policy. It is not less rigorous than basic research. It is rigorous in a different direction.
What the next decade demands
Three forces are pushing applied research from a "nice to have" to a strategic priority.
- Compounding complexity.
- Faster cycles.
- Public legitimacy.
The scholar–practitioner advantage
The most effective applied research has a particular shape: a senior practitioner asking the question, an academic supplying the method, and a faculty community that holds both to standard. This is the scholar-practitioner model. It is what IIFR's Executive Fellow in Management programme is built around. It is also what the National Education Policy 2020 envisions when it talks about Professors of Practice contributing to research alongside teaching.
The scholar-practitioner has structural advantages that pure academics rarely match: access to live organisational data, credibility with C-suite gatekeepers, and an intuition for which questions actually matter. Pair that with rigorous method and academic peer review, and you get research that institutions can act on.
Where this leaves institutions
Institutions serious about applied research will need to do three things at once. They will need to recruit scholar-practitioners deliberately, not as an afterthought. They will need to redesign the incentive structures — what counts as scholarship, how tenure is decided, how output is measured — to reward applied work alongside basic research. And they will need to invest in the partnerships, methods, and platforms that make applied research durable rather than episodic.
The future of management research in India and the Global South is not a choice between rigour and relevance. It is a programme of work that delivers both, deliberately. The institutions that build that programme now will define the next decade of practice.
