Business school leaders face growing pressure to demonstrate the impact of teaching, research and engagement. Expectations have intensified across higher education, driven by public accountability, accreditation, and funding frameworks that increasingly ask not just what institutions do, but what difference their activities make.
Business schools generate large volumes of activity: research outputs, curriculum redesigns, live projects, and external engagement. Yet much of this work remains visible only as outputs, while evidence of real use is harder to trace.
Institutions operate under four overlapping short-term pressures: publish-or-perish incentives, student recruitment targets, accreditation regimes such as AACSB and EFMD’s EQUIS, and stakeholder expectations of immediate relevance. Together, these pressures shape leadership priorities in ways that privilege visible outputs over the slower work of translating activity into outcomes. Recent accreditation thinking, including the draft AACSB 2026 Global Standards, reinforces this leadership responsibility by positioning impact as something that must be intentionally designed and governed.
That familiar tension
At the centre of most business schools sit two core activities: research and education. Both underpin institutional legitimacy – yet both are often organised around visible outputs rather than evidence of use.
In research, this tension is well known. Incentive systems reward publication volume and venue more clearly than engagement, application, or uptake. As a result, much research circulates primarily within academic audiences (even when it addresses problems of clear relevance to practice). This reflects how success is defined and signalled institutionally, rather than being a failure of individual academics.
Similar dynamics appear in education. Professional master’s programmes, MBAs, and executive education are often assumed to deliver impact by default because they target practitioners. In practice, however, their value depends on how learning is designed, supported, and connected to real organisational challenges. Outcomes emerge not from programme labels but from deliberate choices about curriculum, assessment, and engagement.
Across both research and education, the pattern is consistent: where leadership systems emphasise immediate and countable outputs, activity flourishes – but outcomes remain difficult to evidence. Where leaders create space, incentives, and recognition for application and learning over time, impact becomes more visible, though less predictable. The challenge, then, is not whether business schools are active enough but whether leadership design allows activity to mature into outcomes.
Leadership choices
When outcomes stall before they accumulate into impact, the cause is rarely a lack of academic effort. More often, it reflects leadership choices about what is noticed, supported and legitimised. Three such choices matter.
First, leaders must choose what counts as success. In many business schools, success is still primarily recognised at the point of production: publications, modules, partnerships. Outcomes, by contrast, emerge later and often imperfectly, when ideas are taken up or adapted. Leadership that focuses primarily on outputs risks overlooking these early signs of use. Over time, this creates a mismatch between what institutions claim to value – impact, relevance, engagement – and what they actually reward. The result is not cynicism, but drift: activity continues, yet outcomes remain faint.
Then, leaders must choose where the risk of engagement sits. Engaged research, practice-facing teaching, and collaborative work all involve uncertainty. They may not lead to immediate outputs or may generate outcomes that are difficult to standardise quickly. When institutions leave this risk with individual academics, while maintaining unchanged performance thresholds outcomes become fragile. Where leaders instead frame engagement as an institutional commitment, supported through workload, recognition, and narrative protection, outcomes are more likely to surface and persist.
And finally, leaders choose the story they tell about impact. Impact can be framed as compliance – something demonstrated after the fact to satisfy external audiences – or as a learning process that unfolds through interaction. When impact is treated primarily as an audit exercise, academics optimise for documentation rather than use, and institutions risk privileging performance over credibility. When it is understood as an evolving trajectory, leaders create space for judgement, dialogue, and experimentation – conditions in which outcomes are more likely to emerge.
Together, these choices determine whether academic work travels beyond production. They do not guarantee impact, but they determine whether outcomes are given the chance to emerge, be recognised, and grow.
If business schools are serious about impact, the question is not whether they are sufficiently active, but rather whether leaders notice the right things early enough. Impact is less an event to be audited after the fact than a trajectory shaped by what institutions choose to reward, protect and legitimise from the start. The institutions that do this well are not simply producing more activity; they are creating the conditions in which research and teaching can travel further, connect more effectively with practice, and accumulate into outcomes that others can recognise and use.
