The open academic: Why and how business academics should use social media to be more ‘open’ and impactful

The mission of Business Horizons is to publish research that practitioners can understand to help them change how they think and act. However, this mission remains an elusive ideal for many business school academics because they struggle to design and produce research capable of overcoming the “research-practice gap.” To help scholars address this gap, we explain why and how they should use social media to be more ‘open’ to connecting with, learning from, and working with academics and other stakeholders outside their field. We describe how social media can be used as a boundary-spanning technology to help bridge the research-practice gap. To do this, we present a process model of five research activities: networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing. Using research published in Business Horizons as an illustrative example, we describe how social media was used to make each activity more open. We present a framework of four social media enabled open academic approaches (connector, observer, promoter, and influencer) and outline some dos and don’ts for engaging in each approach. We also discuss the potential ‘dark side’ of openness through social media and offer some coping strategies. As per the mission and scope of Business Horizons, this paper aims to help business academics rethink and change their practices so that our profession is more widely regarded for how our research positively impacts business practice and society in general.