AI and Technology Reshaping Academic Research Impact and Business Practices

Research paper downloads act as proxy for academics' real-world influence

In the world of academia, the impact of a research paper is often measured by its publication in prestigious journals and the number of citations it receives from fellow scholars. However, broader measures of influence are emerging, including the number of times research papers are downloaded by non-academic readers: industry leaders, policymakers and curious professionals. Downloads reflect real-world interest and application, demonstrating the potential for business research to inform practice, shape decisions and spark innovation in the global marketplace. So, with the help of SSRN, a free online platform that allows users to access and share scholarly research, we have compiled a table showing the most downloaded recent papers authored or co-authored by business school academics. We analyse the subset of papers downloaded by governments, companies and other credible non-academic users, which serve as a proxy for the wider reach and impact of business school research. Topping our list of downloaded papers is "Monetary tightening and US bank fragility in 2023: mark-to-market losses and uninsured depositor runs?" This study found that the recent rise in interest rates in the US has caused many banks to lose money on their long-term investments, which makes them risky, especially if they have a lot of uninsured deposits. This situation can lead to panic among depositors, as was seen last year with Silicon Valley Bank, where people rushed to withdraw their money because they were worried the bank might fail. Authors Erica Xuewei Jiang of USC Marshall School of Business, Gregor Matvos of Kellogg School of Management, Tomasz Piskorski of Columbia Business School, and Amit Seru of Stanford concluded that regulatory intervention is critical to prevent widespread bank failures, especially as uninsured depositors tend to withdraw en masse, leading to liquidity crises. "We were hoping to influence the academic community that was working on issues of financial intermediation and communicate to them how we thought they should think about the current events and also, more broadly, about bank stability," explains Matvos. "But, then, we also wanted to communicate to policymakers, regulators and the broader public, who would be critical for shaping the response that was to come." Not all business school research needs to have a direct impact to be influential in the long run, argues Matvos. "Some work I do is targeted to a narrow set of people who work on the academic frontier, and I hope that the academic frontier eventually filters into the world. "Because such impact is diffuse and hard to measure, I have to take it on faith that such work will eventually matter in a broad sense. So, there's something very satisfying when the impact of the work is so direct that you can see it in real time." The second ranked paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) -- specifically: "Navigating the jagged technological frontier: field experimental evidence of the effects of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality". It asks whether the technology can help workers do their jobs faster and better, particularly when the tasks are suited to it. However, it concludes that, if the tasks are too complicated for the AI, it can make things worse, causing workers to struggle more and get less done. Authors Fabrizio Dell'Acqua, Edward McFowland of Harvard Business School, Ethan Mollick of Wharton et al conducted their research in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, surveying 758 consultants who were assigned to three conditions: no AI access, AI access via GPT-4, or GPT-4 with prompt engineering support. Results showed that consultants using AI completed 12 per cent more tasks and were 25 per cent faster, producing quality improvements exceeding 40 per cent. Lower-performing consultants benefited the most, increasing their output by 43 per cent, compared with a mere 17 per cent for higher performers. Conversely, for tasks deemed beyond AI's frontier, those using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to achieve correct solutions. "We thought companies and organisations integrating AI into their knowledge work would be the primary beneficiaries of our research, so the number of downloads of our paper has been incredibly encouraging," says Dell'Acqua. "In other work, I've developed the concept of 'falling asleep at the wheel', where workers become overly reliant on high-performing AI and disengage from critical thinking, mindlessly following recommendations without deliberation. "Our research can help organisations design human-AI collaboration systems that keep workers actively engaged, leveraging their unique skills while avoiding this pitfall." Encouraged, in part, by the response to their paper, the researchers are running another experiment to further explore the dynamics of human-AI collaboration. "We're only scratching the surface of understanding this monumental revolution," says Dell'Acqua. "We're excited to uncover more insights that will help shape the future of work." Working remotely is another trend shaping that future. In "Return-to-office mandates", Yuye Ding and Mark (Shuai) Ma of University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business discovered that, when companies in the US required employees to return to the office (RTO), it was more about managers wanting to exercise control and blame others for problems than actually improving work or profits. This move made employees less happy and did not help the companies make more money. Analysing a sample of S&P 500 companies, the study found significant declines in employee job satisfaction following RTO mandates, without corresponding improvements in financial performance or company value. Notably, managers themselves did not profess a strong belief that RTO would increase company performance. Instead, RTO was more likely in companies with poor prior stock performance and under the direction of male and powerful chief executives, suggesting a strategy to scapegoat employees for managerial shortcomings. The paper has been downloaded more than 23,000 times on SSRN. Ma adds that it has been mentioned in the media more than 100 times and led to the authors being interviewed by US radio network NPR, the Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes and other news outlets around the world. "A lot of the SSRN downloads are from practitioners, such as policy advisers, corporate executives and regular workers who are affected by RTO mandates," says Ma. "We believe it's important for business research to study socially relevant and impactful issues, and provide timely feedback on such issues. It's very fulfilling for us to see our study's impact, which also becomes additional motivation for us to continue research on this important topic." One way to encourage this kind of research would be more conferences that involve both practitioners and researchers, argues Ma. "That way, researchers can present their findings to help practitioners make their decisions and also learn more about what is the important question that practitioners and real decision makers face," he says. "It was through discussions with practitioners that we learnt more about other issues that many firms consider when making decisions about return-to-office mandates," Ma explains. "Some practitioners, for example, believed working in the office benefits employee mental health by improving their work-life balance and reducing burnout. As a result, we did a follow-up study on how working from home affects employee mental health." Another paper in the top ten for downloads -- "Counterproductive sustainable investing: the impact elasticity of brown and green firms" by Samuel Hartzmark of Carroll School of Management at Boston College and Kelly Shue of Yale School of Management -- contends that, while investing in "green" (environmentally-friendly) companies is meant to help the planet, it can sometimes make "brown" (polluting) companies worse without really helping the green ones much. Essentially, when it becomes cheaper for green companies to borrow money, it does not change their pollution a great deal. However, when "brown" companies face higher costs, they might pollute even more, suggesting that investment strategies need to be better designed to encourage real improvements in both types of companies. The authors introduced a new measure called "impact elasticity", which quantifies the change in a company's environmental impact resulting from shifts in its cost of capital. They argue for a more nuanced approach that not only encourages improvements in brown companies but also recognises the significant emissions reductions achievable through meaningful investment strategies in high-emission sectors. They also call for a re-evaluation of sustainable investing practices to enhance their effectiveness in achieving genuine environmental progress. "Our biggest desire for this paper is to influence how sustainable investing is actually practised," says Hartzmark. "By presenting facts that we can use to encourage debate, we hope our research influences how these major decisions are actually implemented and ensuring that they have the biggest impact on the climate that is possible. "It's humbling to know that people find your work interesting and, hopefully, it's a sign that people are engaging with our research and changing what they do because of it."

AI tools enhance judgment of relevance of research to society

There have long been calls for business schools to focus on "responsible research" with relevance to society. Now, there is fresh scope to deploy technology to help assess their academics' outputs at scale, albeit with limitations. The leading business school accreditation bodies -- the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, Equis and the Association of MBAs -- are among those seeking societal impact, alongside organisations such as the Responsible Research in Business and Management network and the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education. But calling for responsible research is one thing; measuring it meaningfully and at scale is quite another. It is difficult, by any yardstick, to evaluate digitally the originality and depth of insight of academic writing, let alone assess its ultimate impact. Academic awards and assessments of papers do not necessarily coincide with the views of practitioners seeking practical applications. Ideas may take many years, and be significantly modified, before they are taken up. Some of the strongest may eventually prove to be erroneous and even harmful, or unexpectedly beneficial in unanticipated applications. However, technology tools linked to large language models and artificial intelligence can at least start to measure the extent to which the topics researched and published by academics align with societal objectives. One framework gathering increasing popularity uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) -- 17 objectives agreed by countries around the world for 2030, such as eradicating poverty, provding quality education and taking climate action. Within the 17 goals, there are 169 specific targets. David Steingard, associate professor of management at the Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph's University, in the US, has developed an SDG-Impact Journal Rating to assess how far 100 leading business school academic journals match the goals. ChatSDG, the latest iteration, builds on the approach to show how far schools are aligning their research more broadly with the SDGs. For its latest analysis on how many academics in each business school have published SDG-related articles, the FT has used OpenAlex, the open access data provider. It, in turn, takes into account a series of key SDG terms and definitions developed by the Aurora Universities network. These have been filtered to consider, as a measure of rigour, only articles published in the FT50 list of leading journals. Clarivate, which operates the Web of Science database of journals, is one of several commercial providers also offering SDG analytics. As with OpenAlex, however, it focuses on tallying articles considered to have some SDG relevance, rather than trying to compare the depth of their analysis with other papers. For the FT, Clarivate has identified leading SDG-related articles using a different proxy -- data on the "demand" or level of interest in the articles -- by measuring the number of downloads they generated from readers. The most popular topics in publications highlighted in this way include artificial intelligence and digital innovation, which align respectively with the SDGs for decent work and economic growth and for responsible consumption and production. Wilfred Mijnhardt, policy director at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, goes further in his approach to rating individual journal articles. He has devised an SDG Mapper developed with an open-source list of terms for the different goals, which he has used to rank the intensity of the alignment of each article's contents. For this report, he has generated comparative rankings for the FT50 of journals and for the broader, though largely aligned, list of top journals as assessed by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS). His calculations identify several top themes, including supply chains and recycling; women's economic empowerment; microfinance, and carbon pricing. All these methodologies have their limitations, however. Mijnhardt's list contained at least one historically focused article that had little obvious alignment with the SDGs: a paper from the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis called "Access to finance and technological innovation: evidence from pre-civil war America". Other articles are clearly relevant to the SDGs, but how far they are the most important contributions to scholarship and practice is a far more open debate. They at least provide a new benchmark as academics and business schools consider what to research, and society seeks new ideas on how to tackle problems from climate change to poverty and inequality. Supply chains for clothing Meltem Denizel and Caroline Schumm from Iowa State University explored fashion in their 2023 Journal of the Operations Management article "Closed loop supply chains in apparel: current state and future directions". The academics examined public sustainability reports to compare the low levels of recycling of clothing with the electronics industry, where moves towards a "circular economy" without requiring additional resource depletion is more advanced. They highlighted "the polluting nature" of apparel and textiles, with 120mn tons projected to be purchased by 2030. While the circular market could be worth $700bn by that same year, most such approaches "are unprofitable and only account for a small percentage of a firm's annual sales". Patagonia, for example, offers only one product, the Tee-Cycle T-shirt, that is fully circular. While electronics -- and car producers -- "remanufacture" using recycled products, in clothing the process remains relatively more costly, inconsistent and under-regulated. Clothing stores have the advantage of high-street outlets to help with recycling, but companies take varied approaches on whether they want to reuse only their own materials, as well as difficulties in separating raw materials. Contrasting the differences in acquisition, reprocessing and recycling in clothes and electronics, the authors conclude that the sector offers "fertile research grounds that have the ability to shape practice in profound ways". Marketplace literacy Madhubalan Viswanathan, professor of marketing at the College of Business Administration, Loyola Marymount University in the US, and co-authors including Arun Sreekumar at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, published "Marketplace literacy as a pathway to a better world: evidence from field experiments in low-access subsistence marketplaces" in the Journal of Marketing in 2021. They describe the increasing focus of multinational companies on subsistence marketplaces, or those serving low-income communities, which account for nearly $5trn of spending annually. But they argue that these consumers need "marketplace literacy" to participate "effectively and beneficially" as both consumers and entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they are at a disadvantage -- for instance, missing out on a discount as they are unable to compute the final price. The researchers conducted three field experiments with 1,000 people in 34 remote villages in India and Tanzania, measuring the difference between control groups and those offered training programmes in "know what", "know how" and "know why" (understanding cause and effect). They found the result was an increase in psychological wellbeing and related consumer and entrepreneurial outcomes, and an increase in entrepreneurial outcomes related to wellbeing. Through conducting this research, hundreds of low-income and resource-constrained individuals in remote Indian and Tanzanian areas experienced improvements in their lives and livelihoods. Many participants began to negotiate a product's price or check its quality. Informal water vendors Florence Dery, from Queen's University, Canada, and Ophelia Soliku, from the SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies in Ghana, plus colleagues studied private water sellers in low income regions in their paper "'Quenching the thirst of others while suffering': embodied experiences of water vendors in Ghana and Kenya", published in Social Science & Medicine. Water tanker operators selling from private standpipes and boreholes -- and others working from carts, bicycles or tricycles to transport water -- have a significant role in informal settlements in low- and middle-income countries, but their own health and wellbeing are little studied. The researchers looked at health risks in Accra and Wa in Ghana and Kisumu in Kenya. They found concerns about injury, environmental pollution, stigma and work-life balance, as well the effects of harsh weather conditions, poor physical terrain and abuse from customers. Female water vendors complained about pregnancy complications, baldness and water-related diseases, as well as physical threats. The impact of AI on creativity Nan Jia, at the University of Southern California, Xueming Luo, of Temple University in Philadelphia, and their fellow authors considered, "When and how artificial intelligence augments employee creativity" in the Academy of Management Journal. They studied a telemarketing company to find that AI assistance in generating sales leads on average increased employees' creativity in answering customers' questions during subsequent sales calls, leading to increased sales. But they found the effect was much more significant for higher-skilled employees, and that the role of AI was to intensify the way staff engaged with more serious customers. The result was to allow them to generate innovative scripts and develop positive emotions at work, helping creativity. AI assistance for lower-skilled employees made few improvements on scripts and increased negative emotions at work.