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Business Engagement Project: Hearing the Voice of Industry

Project Description

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is committed to increasing its engagement within the business community. The purpose this project is to contribute to the academic community's better understanding of contemporary and perceived future issues, themes and priorities in management demanding the attention of managers in UK organisations. The project is conceived to give organisations the opportunity directly to influence ESRC's future research agenda and the research agendas of management academics.

The project will focus on eliciting management priorities in the following areas:

To develop these lists of priorities, AIM Scholars met with and interviewed a number of leading practitioners and association leaders in each of the sectors.

Later in 2007 and into 2008, we established a Business Engagement Forum for each sector/area of practice. The creation of sustainable Business Engagement Forums was a key element of the project. Managers were invited to participate in and contribute to the ongoing development and refinement of the list of priorities so that it remains valid and directly informs Research Councils' and academics' research agendas. The first of these, for Creative Industries and the Financial Sector ran in November and December 2007. Business Engagement Forums for Management Consultancy, Marketing Practice and the Retail Sector also ran early in 2008.

At each event, numbers were limited, for further information please contact Richard Adams. The Business Engagement Forums also acts as a conduit through which research results can be communicated back to the management community.

Concurrently, project team members will be mapping recent and previous academic research onto the emergent themes and assessing the extent to which it addresses each of these themes and where gaps remain. For this exercise we had drawn principally on the research output from the first phase of the AIM initiative, but not wholly to the exclusion of other important work in the field.

For further information on the Business Engagement Project, please contact Dr Richard Adams on r.adams@cranfield.ac.uk

PROJECT MEMBERS

Project Leader