Academics and Practitioners: An Important, but Underleveraged Partnership
Dr. Gina O’Connor | PDMA Inspire Innovation Conference • September 15, 2024
Innovation managers and service providers want to stay on top of the latest learning in the field, but as they look to academic researchers, they can’t get past abstracts of researchers’ scholarly articles to understand and implement useful findings. Academic researchers want to create knowledge that will move the innovation field forward, but have trouble forging relationships with businesses and consultancies to gather study data and develop theories. Facing these and other challenges, how do industry practitioners, service providers, and academic researchers meaningfully partner with one another to achieve their goals? In this talk, Professor O’Connor draws on her significant expertise in academic-industry innovation projects to present proven approaches for overcoming difficulties and build bridges across groups, including identifying and resolving bottlenecks, and laying out a plan for PDMA’s research, practice, and service communities to collaborate well with one another.