A business school in service to business: Why I created a corporate think tank

By Erika H. James

Earlier this year, Emory University’s Goizueta Business School launched its “corporate think tank,” an initiative that provides business with research and insights into challenges leaders in the business community face. And today, we released the think tank's first white paper, The Science of Managing Data Science Teams. This think tank represents a shift in the relationship between a business school and businesses -- one that ultimately will strengthen existing relationships built on schools providing interns and shaping future employees and leaders, and businesses providing expert speakers and (sometimes) funding for schools. Through Goizueta’s corporate think tank, partner corporations get access to targeted academic research on their specific challenges and to talented and experienced researchers, and the academy has an additional opportunity to engage with business leaders and tackle real-world problems.

So – how did this all come about? And why?

Six years ago, when I arrived at Goizueta, the relationships between the business school and businesses fell into three categories: recruiting, executive education and individual faculty members’ relationships with corporations. When it came to research, our faculty’s primary audience was the academy. As the vast majority of academics do, they were conducting research to publish in academic journals and present at conferences. Publishing is, of course, absolutely central to faculty members’ identities and responsibilities. But I also believe that business schools need to be in service to business. Goizueta has some of the finest researchers in the nation and Atlanta has the third highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the United States. We had the perfect setting and situation for elevating those relationships and working with business in more ways that would be mutually rewarding.

The effort required some footwork. I began reaching out to corporate CEOs with Atlanta-based companies to find out how Goizueta could be of service to them and how we might help them achieve their strategic goals. It was a different kind of conversation. I wanted us to be partnering with businesses in ways that would help them succeed and that would encourage conversations between businesses and faculty, rather than businesses and students. I made the case that our faculty are an excellent and important source of expertise for business.

While consultants and coaches are a wonderful resource for corporations that are working through challenges, faculty bring something different. And valuable. As researchers, they are trained to be laser-focused on a specific and narrow set of questions and to use sophisticated analytical tools to answer those questions in ways that provide greater assurance of the answers and conclusions. For a corporation, such a partnership is also likely more cost- effective than hiring a consulting firm.

Of course, this work needs to be approached with deference to the norms of academic research: time and the reality that most researchers don’t want to share their findings until they’ve been peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal. That said, it is also possible for faculty to examine and analyze previously published research and data on specific topics. That’s the approach we took with our first white paper on managing data scientists.

We are already learning from our pilot-testing of this effort that we have landed on a win-win approach. We’ve had an invaluable and informative meeting of faculty and business leaders that yielded helpful insights and additional ideas, and faculty are excited about working on real-world challenges and solutions.

We see that this initiative will provide businesses with valuable, evidence-based solutions to the challenges they face and business schools with information about what business needs from the next generation of workers. We can be more effective in delivering education when we know about and understand corporations’ challenges.

A next step I’d like to see in the process we’ve launched here at Goizueta is introducing an interdisciplinary perspective?bringing together faculty from other disciplines to work alongside business school faculty to examine, research and discuss challenges businesses face to develop a more robust set of ideas and solutions.

The think tank and the concept of business schools being of service to businesses is part of an evolution in the business education. New accrediting standards from governing bodies like AACSB require schools to be more aligned with business -- in both curriculum and research. This higher standard also requires allows us to better address the needs of business and we can only do that when we hear directly from them what those needs are and we work together to meet them. It’s better for business, better for the academy, and better for our economy.