A Shared Vision for Research Purpose

This initiative is part of a broader global movement to expand how research impact is understood and demonstrated across business education. The Global Research Impact Task Force builds on important contributions from associations, scholarly academies, journal editors, business schools, and individual researchers who have advanced ideas, frameworks, and practices in this space. These collective efforts highlight both meaningful progress and the need for renewed, coordinated action—an effort AACSB is well positioned to advance through its power to convene participants throughout the global business education ecosystem.

The current system for recognizing research impact has served business education well, but it is being tested by the evolving needs of today’s society. The research landscape is shifting, bringing with it more audiences and greater demands that business schools must address to stay relevant and responsive.

While much has already been explored at the business school level, many of the most pressing barriers are systemic in nature and will require coordination across multiple stakeholders—accrediting bodies, scholarly communities, institutions, practitioners, and policymakers. Systemwide change is rarely immediate; it occurs through incremental steps that build consensus, test new approaches, and gradually shift norms.

Business education has been here before: the Ford and Carnegie reports of 1959 catalyzed a transformation by pointing to shortcomings in rigor, faculty preparation, and scholarly foundations. Their recommendations for expanding doctoral training, embedding research in the social sciences, and raising institutional standards drove a generation of reform that reshaped business schools worldwide. Today, the challenge of broadening how we define and recognize research impact calls for a similar level of coordinated, multistakeholder effort.

Business Schools as the Unit of Analysis

The framework emphasizes impact at the school level rather than the individual scholar level. For schools to progress in demonstrating research impact, they need to adopt a broader perspective, considering the types of faculty members they recruit, the unique experiences and skills those faculty members bring, and the ways they are motivated and supported. By focusing on the school as the unit of analysis, the framework allows institutions greater flexibility and room for innovation in how impact is defined and achieved.

Building on this foundation, this exposure draft provides business schools and their stakeholders with clear, practical guidance on broadening the definition and scope of research impact. Impactful research is not a peripheral activity; it is essential to advancing business, education, and society. By framing business school research as both academically rigorous and societally relevant, the task force aims to amplify its role in preparing leaders, informing policy, and shaping practice.

The framework can also serve as a supplementary resource to AACSB’s accreditation standards, offering recommendations to help schools strengthen alignment between mission, strategy, and societal value. In doing so, it helps institutions demonstrate not only academic excellence but also responsiveness to the world’s most pressing challenges.

Why Now?

Quality research has always been a defining characteristic of business education. It distinguishes AACSB-accredited schools and signals a commitment to academic excellence with global relevance. AACSB and all nine scholarly societies represented on the task force are determined to guide the ecosystem toward a broader, more inclusive understanding of research impact.

The importance of research impact has also been consistently embedded in AACSB’s work. Over the past two decades, major reports and initiatives—including Impact of Research (2008), The Promise of Business Doctoral Education (2012), Impact of Research: A Guide for Business Schools (2012), A Collective Vision for Business Education (2016), Connected for Better (2020), Five Forces Driving the Future of Business Education (2022), Pathways to Innovation (2023), and the 2025 State of Business Education Report—have consistently emphasized the need for research that matters. In particular, AACSB’s 2008 Research Impact Task Force set out principles that continue to serve as relevant and valuable guidance for business schools today.

Yet, current global dynamics, and the mounting pressures that will only grow in the near future, demand urgent attention.

Three developments stand out:

• Intensifying existential pressures on higher education mean that business schools must demonstrate how they provide value to students, industry, and society through their research, education, and outreach activities, more clearly than ever.
• An increasing societal distrust of science and scientific evidence calls for renewed confidence in the integrity, practical applicability, and value of scholarship.
• The rapid rise of AI and emerging technologies is reshaping how knowledge is created, evaluated, disseminated, and used, challenging schools to adapt their research models.

In this context, business schools, and the many disciplines that make them up—such as those represented on this task force—cannot take their contract with society for granted, despite many decades of achievements. Rather, they should strive to advance the impact agenda further. High-quality, impactful research is essential for fulfilling the responsibilities of a modern business school, and this obligation will only grow over time.

By working collectively, AACSB, members of the Global Research Impact Task Force, business schools, and other key stakeholders in business school research will lead the transformation needed to ensure that business school research not only thrives in academia but also delivers meaningful value to business and society.

Research Impact Drives Change

At its core, impactful research is defined by the change it generates, whether in knowledge, practice, policy, or society. Impact can take many forms, both intended and unintended, and may often have long delays. Business schools are responsible for ensuring that their scholarship meaningfully informs the actions and policies of their stakeholders and society at large. By being strategic about what is being studied and how research is conducted, evaluated, disseminated, and applied, schools help shape impact in ways that align with their missions and serve the greater good.

3 Key Channels of Impact

Business school research creates change through three primary channels: teaching and learning, scholarly advancement, and external engagement.

• Teaching and Learning
  When integrated into curricula and pedagogy, research helps shape the mindsets and skills of students across undergraduate, graduate, and executive levels. Embedding research in the classroom not only exposes learners to the latest thinking but also prepares them to apply evidence-based insights in their careers. Through teaching, business schools help mold the leaders and changemakers of tomorrow.

• Scholarly Advancement
  Through rigorous scholarship, business schools generate new knowledge. Historically, much of this knowledge creation has taken place in disciplinary silos, where scholars primarily work with peers in their own field to build the foundations of science.
  
  While this discipline-based scholarship remains essential for scientific advancement, today’s environment also calls for a more expansive approach, one that encourages business schools to address the varied needs of numerous stakeholders. Intersections across disciplines, both within and beyond business, accelerate innovation and help ensure that new knowledge addresses complex and interconnected problems. By fostering more interdisciplinary collaboration in research, business schools can transcend traditional boundaries of inquiry and extend new frontiers of knowledge that better reflect the realities of an interdependent world.

• External Engagement
  Research drives change when it influences policy, practice, and societal outcomes. This requires effective dissemination, translation, engagement, and ideally co-creation. Many faculty, however, lack formal training in communication and dissemination, even as schools have expanded their marketing capacity and built infrastructure to support outreach. Beyond dissemination, an ongoing challenge lies in practitioners’ limited time and capacity to engage meaningfully with research.
  
  An ongoing challenge is that theory-focused research can be limited in its connection to the most critical concerns of business leaders and policymakers. To retain relevance, business schools are encouraged to motivate engaged scholarship that remains theory-grounded but is also accessible, applicable, and designed with end-users in mind.
  
  While simplifying research language is part of the solution, greater impact often comes from building spaces of co-creation, where academics, practitioners, and policymakers work together, respecting one another’s freedoms and differing interests, to identify pressing issues and generate knowledge that is not only rigorous but also relevant and usable.

Intersections Matter

The most significant impact often occurs at the intersections of and within these three channels, such as when scholarly research informs and is integrated into teaching, when insights extend beyond academia into practice and policy, and when knowledge is co-created across boundaries. Just as innovation frequently emerges from the convergence of diverse perspectives and expertise, impactful research thrives at these intersections. They generate virtuous cycles in which research both shapes and is shaped by the evolving challenges of business and society.

This vision aligns with AACSB’s recognition of the diversity of faculty qualifications—scholarly academics, scholarly practitioners, practice academics, and instructional practitioners—and the unique value each group contributes through teaching, scholarship, and outreach. While each type of faculty plays a vital role in advancing the school’s mission, there is an even greater opportunity to foster intentional collaboration across these categories. Such integration can amplify the connections between rigor and relevance, helping schools deliver the kind of impact increasingly expected by students, employers, and society.

AACSB’s broader vision for high-quality business education also embraces co-creation and cross-sector partnerships. These principles are embedded within the AACSB standards, particularly in their societal impact emphasis. Societal impact is not a separate category but a thread woven through all nine standards, designed to shape institutional strategy, guide teaching and scholarship, and inform outreach efforts. By fostering greater intersectionality across research, teaching, and practice, schools can maximize the relevance, reach, and impact of their scholarship.

Assessing Research Impact

Measuring research impact is one of the most complex and debated issues facing business schools. During the task force’s discussions, as well as in survey findings and conversations with stakeholders, impact measurement consistently emerged as one of the most challenging areas. Sometimes impact unfolds over long periods of time, and no single universal metric can fully capture its depth or breadth. At the same time, rigor remains the foundation for impactful research; without robust methods, evidence, and standards of quality, the credibility and long-term influence of research cannot be sustained. High-quality, rigorous research is therefore a necessary condition for impact.

Equally important is the recognition that what schools choose to assess signals what they value strategically and, in turn, motivates faculty behaviors. Metrics and frameworks not only measure but also shape priorities, creating incentives that influence the kinds of research faculty pursue and how they engage with external stakeholders. The signals embedded in assessment systems matter as much as the measures themselves.

Schools are therefore encouraged to consider a mix of impact indicators rather than relying on a single measure. Indicators, when applied thoughtfully, provide evidence that research is contributing to positive change in ways that align with a school’s mission, context, and strategy. While they are not perfect proxies, a diverse mix of indicators (quantitative and qualitative) can capture a more holistic picture of impact and reduce the risk of narrow or distorted assessments.

To guide schools in developing such approaches, three principles are essential, in line with AACSB standards:

• Mission-driven: Indicators should tie directly to the school’s purpose and strategic priorities, reflecting what impact means in its unique context.
• Context-specific: Indicators should account for variations in region, resources, areas of expertise, and balance between research and teaching.
• Evidence-informed: Indicators should draw on both quantitative and qualitative data, applied with attention to validity and reliability, to ensure a well-rounded, credible perspective.

Taken together, these principles support a nuanced and forward-looking approach to assessing impact. Rather than reducing research to counts of publications or citations, they encourage schools to tell a fuller story, one that reflects rigor, relevance, and reach. This holistic perspective allows business schools not only to demonstrate value to academic peers but also to show how their research contributes to practice, policy, education, and society in meaningful, lasting ways.

Examples of Impact Indicators by Type

The Spiral of Impact

Research impact is not linear; it evolves through a spiral process that reflects the co-creative and cumulative nature of influence and learning over time among academic and non-academic stakeholders. The idea that impact can be viewed as a spiral over time rather than a one-off outcome is found in many of the business disciplines represented in this task force. For example, the Association of Information Systems uses the following spiral model to illustrate how the organization considers impact when judging research programs for impact awards. The model emphasizes that while outputs, outcomes, and longer-term implications can be differentiated, they are interdependent and often iterative.

Source: Council of the Association for Information Systems
 

Building on this idea, the table below illustrates the temporal nature of research impact, provides examples of indicators at each stage, and highlights advantages and limitations. Together, these dimensions reinforce the need for a holistic approach to assessing research impact.

A Spiral Approach to Impact

Reward and Motivation Systems

Across our survey, focus groups, and discussions, one theme surfaced repeatedly: reward systems—whether applied to individual faculty or to entire business schools—continue to prioritize traditional academic metrics. Promotion and tenure decisions, as well as institutional rankings, often center on journal-based indicators such as publications in high-impact factor journals, inclusion on specific lists like the University of Texas at Dallas database of 24 journals (UTD 24), the Financial Times list of 50 journals (FT 50), Australian Business Deans Council Journal Quality List (ABDC Journal Quality List), or citation counts.

While these metrics provide value in assessing how research contributes to academic audiences, their dominance has created unintended consequences. Faculty behavior is often driven more by what “counts” in evaluations—in value and in number—than by what creates meaningful impact. This pressure is especially true for early-career researchers, who often feel that without evidence of publishing in top-tier journals, their career progression is at risk.

We heard numerous accounts of faculty who produced research that shaped public policy or business practice but saw it dismissed in their evaluations, or worse, were advised to exclude such work from their dossiers altogether. Whether such contributions should be recognized depends on the school’s research strategy and priorities. For a school that emphasizes influence on practice or policy over theoretical output, these examples should align with its mission and goals.

Rethinking reward systems, including those shaped by rankings, promotion and tenure guidelines, and even the criteria used by journal editors, is a systemic challenge. Yet it is also an essential step toward expanding the definition of impact. The task force believes that progress can be made by reinforcing messages and practices that encourage broader and more meaningful ways of recognizing research impact within schools, across disciplines, and across the publishing ecosystem that helps define what “counts.”

The call for advancing research impact cannot be addressed by any one group alone. It requires coordinated action across accrediting bodies, business school leaders and faculty, practitioners and policymakers, and the broader ecosystem of influencers—including media, rankings, journals, associations, and funders. The following recommendations highlight practical steps each stakeholder group can take to strengthen how business school research is understood, valued, and applied.

Key Recommendations for Advancing Research Impact

What Comes Next?

The ultimate goal of this project is to spark meaningful change in how the impact of business school research is understood, valued, and advanced across business education. Achieving this objective requires broad stakeholder engagement. We invite you to share feedback on the framework presented here through the survey link below: tell us what resonates, what may be missing, and how you believe AACSB, the academies, and other partners can best contribute.

Further, this work will inform the Standards Task Force as it reviews the AACSB standards, ensuring that the framework is closely aligned with them. Members of the academies represented on the Global Research Impact Task Force will also engage with their respective communities to extend this dialogue and integrate the framework within their own processes.

Over the coming months, additional roundtables and conferences will be convened to share this exposure draft and gather further input through January 2026. Insights from this process will inform updates to the framework ahead of its full release at AACSB’s 2026 International Conference and Annual Meeting, in April.

Following the release, phase 2 will focus on implementation: developing new products and services, thought leadership, and practical tools that explore the framework in greater depth and address context-specific needs. These will include best practices, case examples, and guidance to help schools apply the framework effectively within their own missions, regions, and stakeholder environments.

Further, phase 2 will emphasize collaboration with journals and ranking institutions to evolve their evaluation criteria and capture a broader range of impact-related dimensions. AACSB will also explore the development of an impact rating as one possible mechanism to encourage and recognize research that advances meaningful societal change.