Research Center Models for Attracting Corporate Funding

Approaches to generating external funding for research and to support other initiatives and university programs are presented. Emphasis is placed on value added research that stimulates intellectual activity and provides revenue that offsets the increasing limitations of university funding. The approaches presented proved successful for both urban and non-urban university environments

Corporate Sponsorship of Academic Research: The Trend, Its Drivers, and Its Implications

Budgets are shrinking in higher education, and greater financial accountability is simultaneously being demanded of universities. One of the consequences is that internal funding for research is more difficult to access than in years past. In such an environment, corporate sponsorship is an alternative that must be considered. In this article, we describe the forces compelling business schools to seek corporate sponsorship for research. Then, we discuss why some business faculty may perceive undesirable constraints in corporate-sponsored research. We also describe the challenges that researchers often need to address in order to secure corporate sponsorship and take full advantage of it. We conclude by describing some of the implications of this paradigm shift in research funding. When corporate funding is accessed and the relationship with the sponsoring organization is managed well, incentives are aligned among researchers, universities, and corporations. Benefits also include the development of new knowledge, solutions to real-world business problems, funding for researchers and universities, enhanced teaching, and a clear demonstration of the value of academic research

If Practice Makes Perfect, Where do we Stand?

Practitioners have played an important role in the information system (IS) field’s development since its beginnings. In the 1970s, IS researchers’ integration with practitioners was high with Society for Information Management members receiving copies of the MIS Quarterly, practitioners funding the ICIS Doctoral Consortium, and submissions receiving at least one practitioner review. Today, however, the integration between practitioners and researchers appears more distant. Given that almost 50 years have passed since the field’s development, we believe that we need to reflect on the past, present, and future relationship between IS research and IS practice. Has the distance between academics and practitioners become too great? Is our relevance too low to expect practitioners to join AIS and attend our conferences? How might we increase the integration? At a panel at ICIS 2018, several panelists provided position statements about those issues