Pracademics. A pracademic holds two roles at once: practitioner in an industry and academic who studies it. This combination is valuable and underused. Pracademics can steer research toward the problems practitioners care about most and bring the relevant research insights to the executives who decide.

Why now? The value of connecting research and practice rises with the pace of change. When industries changed slowly, findings stayed applicable longer and the cost of slow stayed transmission low. Today, technology reshapes products, risks, and rules swiftly, so published research often lags the problems it studies. At the same time, more research is published than any busy executive could screen, which moves the bottleneck from producing knowledge to selecting the knowledge that matters for a given decision. Fast change and abundant research both call for people who can translate between practice and academia.

Commitments.

• We are obsessed with relevance: we judge our own work by one measure of impact, whether it changes decisions.

• We move information and knowledge in both directions: we help practitioners dissect research and bring the critical problems our industry faces to fellow researchers who can study them.

• We are continuously active in both worlds and hold our outputs to the respective standard: peer review for the journal article, and actionable precision for the executive committee presentation.

• We calibrate our closeness: we share industry constraints so researcher's assumptions stay realistic, and we support the academic freedom to explore what is not yet on the industry's agenda.

• We teach leveraging both halves of our career: we combine practical experience with the theoretical and empirical literature, to drive home learning outcomes that benefit participants.

• We present the two parts of our career with pride; we have one CV, not two.

Our contribution. Practitioners develop strategies and solve problems, and their solutions must demonstrably work, fit the budget, and measurably support their colleagues and their organization's objectives. Academics differ: they are fluent in the theories and empirical results of their field, and skillful with research methods. A pracademic is proficient in both and embodies each role fully.

Our challenge. Career structures reward the pracademic combination poorly. University promotion criteria weigh publications and rarely weigh years of professional experience. Industry employers rarely grant time for research or credit for publications. Each side selects for one role OR the other. As a result, few people sustain both careers, and the connection between research and practice is left to chance encounters. These are choices; institutions can revise them.

Call for action. Universities: value industry experience in hiring and promotion, and build positions designed for individuals who keep a foot in practice. The return is research shaped by the most urgent industry problems and graduates whom employers seek out: students taught on real, current problems arrive at work ready to contribute. Funders and policymakers: pay for translation and dissemination alongside knowledge production, and consult pracademics on where the evidence gaps sit. The return is demonstrable impact from the research you fund and rules grounded in the best available evidence. Employers: give pracademics in your organization time to research and credit for publishing. The return is earlier access to insights relevant to your hardest decisions, selected by someone who knows your organization from the inside. Professional bodies: run forums where researchers and practitioners, moderated by pracademics, meet regularly. The return is an industry that learns faster than its problems grow.

Join. If you work across practice and academia, you are already part of this movement. Be visible: tell each world about your work in the other. Each time you do, evidence reaches another decision and a real problem reaches another researcher: value for the organizations we serve, the students we teach, and the fields we study!

Onwards,

Daniel Liebau

P.S. This is a draft, prepared in July 2026. If you have comments or ideas, or want to appear as a public supporter of the cause, please email me at liebau@rsm.nl. I also thank Michael Low, Bex Hewett, Vanessa Ward, Tiffany Wong and David Stolin for their useful comments on an earlier version of this document.