The collaboration between our business school research team and Co-operators, the Canadian insurer, presents a model for bridging the gap between academia and practice. Rather than conducting research and then translating the findings for practitioners, we engage with managers from the beginning to develop a tool for addressing complex system challenges.
Karen Flamand, assistant vice-president of claims shared services at Co-operators, approached us to assist in addressing one of the most challenging problems her company faces. Co-operators wanted to find a way to construct sustainable homes that are more resistant to damage from severe weather events, without increasing overall costs. Over the past eight months, we have worked alongside Co-operators employees and other stakeholders to generate ideas, ranging from simple internal policies like training programs to radical systemic changes such as a resilience fund to which all insurers contribute. Our approach to corporate innovation incorporates “out of the box” systems thinking.
Co-operators could have developed solutions on its own, but businesses often limit themselves to feasible ideas based on their own experiences. By partnering with academics, we believe more creative solutions can be fostered as they can think abstractly and introduce ideas from other contexts. Co-operators is now exploring some of these ideas to address the challenges posed by climate change.
Most business school academics typically maintain a distance from managers. Academics spend years collecting hard-to-acquire data, analyzing it, writing up their findings, and then undergoing rigorous review and revision before publishing in specialized journals. This process often produces narrowly focused, difficult-to-understand papers that are restricted by paywalls.
While the research may be sound and even profound, this process can create a divide between academics and managers. As a result, the majority of publicly funded research aimed at improving business rarely reaches the intended audience.
Given the uncertainties and turbulence arising from climate change, new technologies, complex supply chains, and geopolitical destabilization, it has never been more crucial for business researchers to bridge this divide. However, in the face of instability, executives tend to narrow their focus and seek easy, incremental solutions that can exacerbate problems rather than solving them. Managers feel overwhelmed by data but starved for useful insights.
At the same time, publicly funded academics conducting independent research are filling hundreds of journals that managers rarely read. Most executives struggle to name even a single academic who has influenced their practice. Academics have the potential to change this situation, but not through traditional approaches that merely translate and disseminate their research. Instead, they need to collaborate with managers, bringing abstract knowledge to their more detailed insights. We are more creative when we work together rather than independently.
Our approach is not consultancy disguised as research. We don’t offer advice or charge exorbitant fees that would incentivize us to simply tell managers what they want to hear. Instead, we deeply engage with the challenges, collaborate closely, and strive to change business practices while advancing academic research. Our primary objective is to learn and share insights with other academics and future managers.
Some academics argue that this type of partnership is not research because those involved work too closely together and lose their objectivity. However, we take careful measures to maintain our independence in what we know, how we think, and the outcomes we co-create. Our differences are what make this effort so valuable.
Through the Network for Business Sustainability, we have recognized the value of translating and disseminating research to managers. However, we also discovered that it’s challenging to change business practices based solely on research insights. Innovation North, a community of researchers and business practice partners, is our response, emphasizing two key principles.
First, researchers and practice partners share the same goal: to create new products and services that promote sustainability and build more resilient systems. Second, we focus on developing tools rather than models or frameworks. Models are rooted in the past, while tools shape the future. Our tools shift the focus from known probabilities to imagined possibilities, allowing managers to envision innovative solutions.
Our online tool and approach, called the Compass, was developed in collaboration with our practice partners. It guides organizations through a corporate innovation process for tackling system challenges. When used in partnership with executives, Compass helps businesses navigate towards their “North Star”: a purpose beyond profit. Unlike design thinking, which can inadvertently create system problems by solely focusing on customer needs or problems, such as plastic waste accumulation and greenhouse gas emissions, our approach facilitates profitable innovations that meet the needs of communities and the planet.
We have already generated innovative ideas with Co-operators, and we are also working with the Cboe Canada stock exchange and the Royal Bank of Canada to develop a financial instrument that improves biodiversity and contributes to climate resiliency.
In our partnership, we discovered that the issue of biodiversity was too broad, so we narrowed our focus to regenerative agriculture. We mapped systems to identify meaningful interventions that farmers can undertake with additional funding. By bringing together diverse stakeholders in a safe space and leveraging evidence-based research, we have been able to collaboratively create solutions.
The financial instrument we are developing will be accessible to the mass market, not just mainstream investors. By engaging with and convening a wide range of stakeholders, we gain insights into the barriers within the system that hinder biodiversity protection on agricultural land and discover mechanisms that value regeneration rather than extraction.
At the conclusion of our work, Cboe Canada and RBC will have a framework for an innovative financial instrument, the research team will have data to shape leading ideas in sustainable finance, and Canadians will have the opportunity to support their country’s biodiversity.
Tima Bansal is a professor of strategy at the Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada, and Garima Sharma is an assistant professor at the Kogod School of Business, American University. They are co-authors of the book “Three Different Approaches to Impact: Translating, Co-creating and Performing” (2022, Sage).
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