Bridging the Great Divide: How Science Can Spark Better Policy

Описание: Want Your Research to Matter? Try SPARC
The research-policy gap is real and wide. In management and business scholarship, only a few studies influence real-world policy. Enter SPARC: a framework designed to help scholars become policademics—researchers who actively shape public policy with evidence-based insights.
Here are 5 takeaways from our Business Horizons article:
1. The Research-Policy Gap Is Alarming: Fewer than 1% of management articles explicitly address policy. Despite growing societal challenges, too much valuable research remains unused or unread by decision-makers.
2. SPARC = A Practical Roadmap for Impact: The SPARC framework (Societal challenge, Pragmatism, Action, Result, Connections) helps researchers plan and disseminate policy-relevant work. It’s intentionally sequential and actionable—no vague advice here.
3. Policymakers Need Us, Too: The gap goes both ways—many policies are made without evidence. SPARC encourages collaboration across research lifecycles so policy can be informed rather than improvised.
4. From Planning to Publication, Structure Matters: SPARC isn’t just for brainstorming; it’s also a tool for writing. Researchers can use it to clearly derive policy implications in their manuscripts, making their work more digestible and usable for non-academic audiences.
5. It's Time to Reward Policymaking Research Journals and universities must evolve to reward policy-relevant scholarship. SPARC arrives at a turning point, where academic prestige should meet public purpose.
Get open-access article: Bird, J. M., & Aguinis, H. 2025. A SPARC for bridging the research-policy gap. Business Horizons. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2025...