Post-secondary institutions generate vast amounts of knowledge and groundbreaking innovations, yet academics often struggle to find an audience for their complex insights and discoveries. There are increasing calls for scholars to be more open and consider the practical, societal, policy and educational impacts of their work.
How can academics advance their field and mobilize knowledge to benefit society? Academic openness—a collaborative research orientation—is key to advancing scholarly impact, according to Simon Fraser University (SFU) business professor Ian McCarthy.
McCarthy is the W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation and Operations Management at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. His research and teaching focus on managing operations and innovation, change management, social media, creative consumers and the world of management education in general. He has authored numerous highly cited articles on these topics and is an avid blogger and Twitter user.
McCarthy’s recent article, The open academic: Why and how business academics should use social media to be more ‘open’ and impactful, with Marcel Bogers from Eindhoven University of Technology, discusses how academics can use social media to help bridge the research-practice gap and put their good ideas to work.
McCarthy and Bogers identify five research activities—networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing—and how social media can help make each activity more open. They also present four social media-enabled open academic approaches—connector, observer, promoter and influencer—and outline some do’s and don’ts for engaging in each approach.
They hope the article will help academics not only discover new ways to share their own ideas and insights, but also find ways to leverage experience and expertise from their audiences.
We spoke with professor McCarthy about his recent article.
Traditionally, academic scholarship and knowledge was sequestered in the “ivory tower.” Your article discusses how and why business academics should practice academic openness. Tell us more.
In management research and other academic fields, openness helps us better identify and formulate problems for research using knowledge from those who experience the issues rather than those who merely study them. This engagement with a greater range of stakeholders and expertise helps us draw upon their perspectives, theories and methods to design, conduct and disseminate more impactful research.
It also pushes us to frame our intellectual ideas and technical research findings in ways that resonate with and are more accessible to practitioners, policymakers and the public. Addressing complex global challenges requires openness in utilizing different academic, policy and business expertise. Lastly, given that we work for a publicly funded university, I believe we should be more open to working on issues that benefit the public and make more of our research accessible to have a better impact.
What are overlooked or unknown benefits of using social media?
Social media changes how we network and converse with each other and how we learn and share knowledge. In fact, we, the authors of this article, discovered and interacted with each other via Twitter back in 2012. From these interactions, we collaborated on articles, journal special issues, workshops and conferences. We have also used social media to fruitfully engage with scholars and other stakeholders outside of our academic fields to co-produce ideas, projects and results that exceed our individual capabilities.
If I am an academic reading this article and want to start engaging on social media, what platform do I choose and how do I get started?
An excellent platform to start with is LinkedIn, whose mission is “to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.” You can have rich work-related engagements with people interested in you and your research topics via the LinkedIn network you build and curate. You can also learn from and share ideas using the platform’s discussion boards, groups, and its ‘write an article’ function. Your postings can include text, images, videos, URLs and files such as articles and presentations. And in addition to seeing the ‘like’, ‘comment’ and ‘repost’ activity that your posts garner, you can use LinkedIn analytics to see who has viewed and engaged with your postings, where they are located, who they work for and their job titles.
What if the individual does not have time or feel comfortable engaging via social media? Are there other ways to be open, collaborative and share research outside of social media channels?
Don’t think social media is just the comprehensive social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Other social media for impactful knowledge transfer includes podcasts for spoken word broadcasts and academic oriented news platforms such as The Conversation Canada, Medium and PsyPost that host news stories and opinion pieces drawing on research. As we explain in our paper, different forms of social media can be used not just for disseminating, but also for the networking, framing, investigating and assessing aspects of research.
Tell us about the ‘dark side’ of engaging in social media. What should I absolutely not do as an aspiring social media contributor?
A recognized dark side of social media-enabled openness is how time-consuming it can be to use this boundary-spanning technology to be more open. Dealing with this concern requires the same disciplined, goal-directed time and attention management central to most work. Also, your research goals should set how much time you spend, as well as the value you and society think your research has.
Our paper provides some dos and don’ts for the different approaches to social media-enabled openness. The number and complexity of these points of advice increase the more active and open the approach is. One of our favourites is: don’t neglect rigour, integrity and nuance when engaged in the promotor approach. Be guided by good scholarship and avoid journalistic sensationalism, exaggeration and hyperbole. We also highlight the importance of using compelling images, videos and captions for the platform and the desired audience outcome to be an effective influencer.
For more: Visit professor McCarthy’s blog It Depends, and read the scholarly impact profile, Tall tales and half-truths: dealing with workplace bullshit.
SFU's Scholarly Impact of the Week series does not reflect the opinions or viewpoints of the university, but those of the scholars. The timing of articles in the series is chosen weeks or months in advance, based on a published set of criteria. Any correspondence with university or world events at the time of publication is purely coincidental.
For more information, please see SFU's Code of Faculty Ethics and Responsibilities and the statement on academic freedom.