It’s not enough for HE to want to have social impact

Business schools have been using the language of societal impact for some time. Mission statements invoke responsible leadership, the common good and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Conferences debate relevance and purpose. Accreditation bodies raise the bar on impact evidence.

Yet the uncomfortable truth, argued compellingly from multiple directions in recent scholarship, is that the language does not translate into structural change.

Social impact remains, for most institutions, a transactional supplement to the core, that is, a specialisation, an elective, a conference theme, a consulting project rather than a fundamental reorientation of how knowledge is created, translated and applied.

Two contributions sharpen this critique. A 2021 AACSB Insights article identified the dominant research model as “linear valorisation”, meaning knowledge flows in one direction, from researcher to journal to tenure dossier, with schools and faculty as the primary beneficiaries and society as an afterthought.

The authors’ proposed alternative – the catalysing model – places co-creation and dual validation at the centre, recognising that management research is a social science whose legitimacy depends on engagement with the communities it seeks to serve.

In a 2026 Medium commentary, Ulrich Hommel deepens the indictment by drawing on a pattern that is well documented in institutional theory: organisations that develop sophisticated language around a social mission can become structurally insulated from the pressure to act on it.

The discourse of impact becomes a substitute for its delivery. It seems that the more fluent an institution becomes in the vocabulary of change, the less urgency it feels to change.

This fluency trap explains the persistence of the relevance gap in management education. It is not ignorance of the problem. The problem has been named, analysed and has been the subject of conferences for several decades.

Rather, the institutional architecture of most business schools systematically rewards activities that reproduce the gap, and the language of engagement provides sufficient reputational cover to avoid the costs of closing it.

The catalysing model is the right diagnosis. What is needed now is the operational architecture that enables it to move from aspiration to practice, embedded structurally, not dependent on the energy of individual champions who may move on or burn out.

Two domains that must become one system

The first step toward operational clarity is to name the structural duality that characterises knowledge production in business schools.

On one side sits what might be called the upstream knowledge domain, shaping the creation of academic and professional research through institutional engagement, peer-reviewed publication, doctoral education and academic (graduate) degree programmes that develop analytically trained future professionals. This is the domain of scientific validation of knowledge.

On the other side sits the downstream knowledge domain based on application and delivery through executive education, corporate partnerships, lifelong learning, innovation centres, professional degree programmes and the corporate and alumni networks that connect management knowledge with organisational practice. This is the domain of societal validation of knowledge.

These are not in opposition. Both are legitimate and necessary. The problem is that they have become institutional silos, that is, parallel systems with separate faculties, governance structures and performance metrics, and there is very little systematic traffic between them.

Research findings rarely reach executive education curricula in a timely or usable form. Corporate partners engage with alumni networks, but exert little influence over research agendas.

The practitioners who could test and apply scholarly knowledge remain largely unreachable, and the experiential knowledge practitioners hold – knowledge of what works, what fails and what the next pressing questions are – rarely feeds back into the research process.

The catalysing model demands that these two domains of knowledge production, in fact, can operate as an integrated system, where upstream and downstream knowledge, each in its own way, drive the creation of impact.

It requires, as the Insights article mentioned above argued, a move away from linear valorisation toward what they call dual validation: a continuous, reinforcing cycle in which knowledge creation is shaped by societal demand and knowledge application generates evidence that feeds back into scholarly inquiry.

The key word is continuous. This is not a stand-off (upstream produces, downstream applies) but a cycle in which each stage conditions the next.

Five processes that make the value creation cycle real

What does that cycle look like in operational terms? Five interconnected processes are required.

The first is demand sensing: the systematic identification of real-world challenges, organisational needs and societal questions that should shape the research agenda. Most business schools lack a formal mechanism for this.

Corporate engagement builds relationships and transactional revenue; it rarely provides structured input to research priority-setting. Without demand sensing as a deliberate institutional function, using available methodologies from design, innovation and engagement, the research agenda remains driven by disciplinary tradition rather than by societal need.

The second process is knowledge generation itself informed by demand sensing rather than insulated from it. The third is knowledge translation: the conversion of research outputs into forms practitioners can access, understand and apply.

This is where the infrastructure of most business schools is most visibly inadequate. Translation is treated as a communications task (press releases, practitioner summaries, media engagement) rather than as a scholarly function in its own right.

Genuine translation requires domain expertise, sustained relationships with practitioner communities and institutional accountability for whether knowledge actually changes practice.

The fourth process is practice application: the deployment of translated knowledge in real organisational and community settings, with ongoing monitoring of what works and why. The fifth is impact and outcome assessment: the systematic documentation of change attributable to the knowledge cycle, feeding evidence back into the demand-sensing process and completing the loop.

Together, these five processes describe not a project or a programme but a permanent institutional function that should run continuously alongside and in integration with research and teaching, rather than as a parallel activity managed by a separate engagement unit.

Two engagement stages, not one

Operationalising the catalysing model also requires distinguishing between two structurally distinct forms of external engagement – a distinction that most business schools currently collapse into a single, undifferentiated “stakeholder engagement” category.

The first type is “institutional engagement”, connecting the school’s knowledge creation side to the academic and institutional ecosystem: research networks, funding bodies, doctoral communities, accreditation organisations and peer institutions.

This engagement stage ensures that knowledge generation meets rigorous scholarly standards and remains connected to emerging disciplinary developments. It is well understood and well-funded.

The challenge here is not absence but direction: Stage 1 engagement has become, in many schools, self-referential, feeding primarily back into academic reputation management rather than into a broader value creation cycle. The catalysing model requires this engagement to be explicitly orientated toward societal impact as well as scholarly excellence.

The second engagement stage is “corporate and alumni engagement”, connecting the knowledge application side to the professional and societal ecosystem: corporate partners, alumni networks, regional policymakers, innovation actors, social enterprises and community organisations.

This is precisely where the gap between rhetoric and structure is most visible. In most business schools, Stage 2 engagement is configured primarily as a transactional revenue- and reputation-generating function. Executive education generates income. Alumni networks support fundraising and rankings. Corporate partnerships provide case study material.

What is largely absent is accountability to these stakeholders for knowledge outcomes, that is, robust mechanisms by which corporate partners and community organisations contribute to research agenda setting rather than merely to institutional revenue.

The catalysing model, when properly operationalised, requires Stage 2 to serve as genuine demand-sensing infrastructure: a systematic channel through which the questions that matter to practitioners and communities shape the questions that scholars investigate.

This means structuring corporate and community relationships around knowledge co-production rather than service provision and creating feedback mechanisms that carry experiential knowledge upstream rather than allowing it to dissipate in one-off project reports.

The institutional conditions that make it possible

None of this happens without deliberate structural investment. Three institutional conditions are foundational. The first is a knowledge translation function that sits between the creation and application domains (staffed, resourced and accountable) and whose purpose is to manage the bi-directional flow of knowledge between scholarship and practice.

This is not a rebranded communications role. It requires people with both academic credibility and practitioner networks, and a mandate that includes feeding practitioner feedback upstream into research agendas, not merely packaging research outputs for practitioner consumption.

The second condition is governance integration. The creation and application domains currently report through separate leadership lines – deans of research on one side and directors of executive education or engagement on the other – with no structural mechanism for joint strategic decision-making.

The catalysing model requires a governance body that bridges this divide: one with authority over shared impact priorities, cross-domain resource allocation and integrated accountability to the institution’s mission. Without this, the cycle breaks down at the institutional seam between research and engagement.

The third condition is faculty incentive reform. Tenure and promotion criteria that reward only A-journal publications create an institutional logic powerful enough to overwhelm any stated strategic commitment.

Both the Insights article and Hommel document this mechanism with precision: the incentive system does not merely fail to reward engagement; it actively penalises the time and relational investment that genuine co-production requires.

Broadening evaluation frameworks to recognise demand sensing, knowledge translation, community-engaged research and documented practice impact is not a dilution of scholarly standards. It acknowledges that the catalysing model requires scholarly contributions that current evaluation systems cannot see, reward or sustain.

What deans must decide

The argument above implies a set of concrete institutional choices that ultimately fall to deans and their leadership teams. The first is whether to treat Stage 2 engagement as a transactional revenue function or as a transformative knowledge co-production function and to accept that the latter requires different structures, different relationships and different accountability mechanisms than the former.

The second is whether to establish a dedicated professional knowledge translation function as a permanent institutional feature or to continue delegating translation informally to communications teams and individual faculty with an interest in practitioner engagement.

The third choice – perhaps the most politically costly – is whether to restructure faculty evaluation to formally recognise the full range of contributions the catalysing model requires.

This choice has institutional consequences: it affects hiring criteria, promotion decisions and the signals sent to doctoral students about what a successful academic career looks like. It also has reputational consequences in a rankings environment that remains heavily weighted toward publication metrics. Deans who make this choice will need to be prepared to argue its merits to colleagues, governing boards and accreditation reviewers.

Hommel identifies the economic model itself as the deepest structural barrier. Tuition levels that place graduates under significant debt pressure effectively force career choices toward the highest-paying pathways, regardless of interest in social impact work.

Ranking architectures reward selectivity, salary outcomes and placement in elite firms, not graduates’ contributions to underserved communities or organisations addressing systemic challenges. Dependencies on executive education create obligations to corporate clients whose interests do not always align with a mission of responsible management education.

None of these constraints dissolve through better mission statements. They require deliberate redesign and leaders prepared to accept short-term costs in exchange for long-term mission integrity.

From thought to movement

The catalysing model for research, articulated in the Insights article in 2021, remains a compelling, coherent framework for understanding what a socially engaged business school should look like. Its core insight – that business and management research is a social science whose value depends on co-production with the communities it serves – has only grown more urgent in the five years since its publication.

What has been missing is the operational clarity needed to move it from an aspirational framework to institutional practice.

Operational clarity now exists. The upstream-downstream distinction, the five-process knowledge cycle, the two engagement stages, the knowledge translation function and the governance integration requirement together constitute a blueprint for implementation – one grounded in the logic of the catalysing model and designed to give it structural permanence rather than leaving it dependent on the energy of committed individuals.

The core insight here – one that institutional theory has long established and that Hommel’s analysis applies with force to business schools – is that the gap between stated mission and lived practice closes only when the institution’s architecture is redesigned to close it.

Rhetoric and reality diverge not because leaders lack sincerity, but because the institution’s incentive systems, governance structures and performance metrics consistently reward behaviours that are different from those the mission proclaims.

Redesigning the architecture is therefore not an optional supplement to strategic ambition. It is the precondition for it. For business schools that have endorsed the catalysing model in principle, the question that remains is whether they are prepared to build the structures that make it real.

Ulrich Hommel is a professor of finance and vice-dean of education at the EBS University of Business & Law in Germany and Managing Director of XOLAS Advisors GmbH, a Germany-based consultancy focused on the management education sector. Wilfred Mijnhardt is the policy director at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and an honorary professor at the Edinburgh Business School, Heriot–Watt University.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of University World News. This article was developed in dialogue with artificial intelligence. The arguments, judgments and positions expressed are the authors’ own. The AI shaped the conversation; it did not determine the conclusions.