EIASM Forum on Business School Strategy and the Quality of Research
Copenhagen Business School, October, 2nd – 2013
See: www.eiasm.org/frontoffice/event_announcement.asp?event_id=1002
Some thoughts on the organization, strategy and quality of research
Radu Vranceanu
Dean for Research
ESSEC Business School, Cergy, France
The economic environment of European Business Schools is changing fast; thirty years ago, higher
education institutions lived a comfortable life of quasi-monopoly; degrees delivered in one country
would not have been recognized in another country; as a consequence, students have little incentive
to shop around for the best value for money (or education time). No journalist would have the weird
idea to compare a German with a French programme. In the meantime, the removal of national and
administrative barriers, combined with an intensive standardization process, has led to the creation
of a genuine international market in business education. As a consequence, many education and
business journals publish now various rankings of education programmes, irrespective of their
country of origin. These changes are even stronger within the European Union region, where the
process of degree normalization is almost complete.
Facing now a much stronger competition, Business Schools have come to realize that “strategy”
matters for themselves, and not only for the “private business”, which is their main research and
teaching object. Good management and a good strategy require that the top administration of the
school is able to take the right steps at the right moment. Most often, such steps bring about some
form of product differentiation: geographic (schools can expand their activities abroad), horizontal
(invest in brand image and in some moderate specialization) and vertical (program quality). In this
respect, Business Schools now behave very much like corporations: discussions on the Executive
board of a School sound more and more like those of a private company’s board; school directors
talk about business models, net present value, differentiation strategy, communication, and so on.
Some will even push the comparison even further to talk about students as “customers”. Following a
trend set by private businesses, Business Schools are increasingly using performance-based
compensation schemes to reward their Faculty. Almost all European Business Schools run now
complex “incentive systems”, in general a bonus scheme for publication.
Experience has shown that a good strategy can help a school reach a top position in the eyes of
students, recruiters and journalists; and a poor strategy can bring a school to its knees in a short
lapse of time. It is of course beyond the purpose of this short text to try to answer to the question
“what is a good strategy” and even less so to define “good research management”. The question we
want to address here is “how such a strategy should be designed?”
With one or two exceptions, leading business schools are all strong research institutions, contributing
to advancing knowledge in management and generating an impressive flow of publications in top
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journals. Furthermore, the overall quality of a degree is difficult to assess because it relies on many
subjective and sometimes quickly changing dimensions. In this context, one efficient way to signal
that a school can deliver high quality education is to follow the example of these leading schools and
publish a substantial amount of research. In this environment of imperfect information, schools that
do not play the publication game might soon see their reputation fading out and their resources too.
Like it or not, having a (good) strategy for research is a key success factor for a Business School these
days. [see Note]
Yet the similarity between Business Schools and private companies stops here. Unlike corporations,
that have more or less well defined hierarchies, with strictly defined command and control
processes, schools are systems based on collegial decision-making. Their ability to achieve their
missions – education and research -- depends on a large extent on the “academic entrepreneurship”
of their Faculty. While in a typical company a strategy can be imposed top down, and those who
dislike it can just leave the firm, in a school such an attempt could only fail. Any education strategy,
including research strategy, should be developed working with the Faculty, i.e. those who are
expected to be the vectors of this strategy.
Thus the efficiency of any strategy depends on the processes underlying the elaboration and
implementation of such strategy. A strategy will not become effective if it is not understood and
shared by those people this strategy aims to impact. No research strategy can be successful if the
majority of professors does not support it. Hence, it is important to maintain a permanent state of
alertness of the researchers about the goals of the schools that go beyond simple reporting of
performance indicators. Professors, as actors of the strategy, should also contribute to its design; this
does not rule out the essential role of the top management of the school that is responsible for
developing the right processes. A right process should be rule-based; rules must be fair, transparent,
and should apply to all in the same way. The rules must be set at the appropriate level of generality;
rules applying to all details are killing initiative and creativity; rules too vague open the door to
opportunistic behavior.
A good process also requires that the strategic discussion about research should not be discontinued.
For instance, should a School decide to make a strategic realignment every five years, the
involvement of the Faculty in the definition of a research strategy should continue over this period.
This can be done by working on annual (or bi-annual) projects such as “how to improve research
performance?”, “what is the research position of the school in the general landscape?”, “what are
the key academic challenges for researchers in the ten years to come?”, etc. The role of these
discussion is to make sure that professors understand the research goals of the institution, and, very
importantly, that they understand each other. Sometimes tensions between scholars are determined
by poor communication. Clarifying goals and roles is a powerful element of improving the work
environment and by the same move, raising research productivity.
One important element of the debate is information provided by external auditors, if the latter are
taking their job seriously. Many schools face the challenge of raising the quality of their research.
This requires a cold and critical assessment of their existing performance. Like many other exercises
of human introspection, research assessments performed by internal teams are quickly facing the
difficulty of evaluating colleagues and friends. Such forms of evaluation from within might not be
able to bring about the radical reforms need to achieve a strong performance improvement. It is
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true, external experts might have a weaker understanding of the subtle dynamics of research within
a school, and might suggest solutions that do not match the culture or values of the institution.
Probably, a mix of external and internal recommendations should be the best way to achieve a
gradual improvement in the quality of research.
Note. See also Besancenot, Damien, Joao Ricardo Faria, and Radu Vranceanu. 2009, "Why business
schools do so much research: A signaling explanation." Research Policy 38, 7, pp. 1093-1101.
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