194: Toward Elevating the Contribution of Executive Doctorate Degrees to Innovating for the Future (21174)

Executive doctorate degrees are becoming increasingly prevalent in business schools across Asia, Europe, and North America. The emergence of new programs every year represents a great opportunity to enhance management scholarship and practice through the training of senior executive leaders to utilize rigorous academic research that bridges academic empiricism and theory with practitioner hands-on experience. Undoubtedly, the challenge is to ensure that the research completed in executive doctoral programs is relevant, rigorous, and impactful, and that graduates are equipped to be effective practitioner scholars in their future careers. The purpose of this PDW is to facilitate dialog and brainstorming between business school faculty, executive doctoral students and alumni to share experiences, discuss the features of executive doctorate degrees that contribute to executive development and business practice, and identify opportunities for improving the design and delivery of executive doctoral programs. In short, our goal is to reveal insights that will help forge a path for executive doctoral students to become practitioner scholars who bring unique perspectives and competencies to innovating for the future. Topics of discussion include learning outcomes and professional goals for executive doctoral programs, reasonable expectations of executive doctorate students, curricular design and content, research expectations for executive doctoral programs, fostering meaningful collaboration between students and faculty, and opportunities for the dissemination of executive doctorate research.