1358: Making IB Research Impactful: An Analysis of UK Research Excellence Framework Impact Case Studies (14876)

The International Business (IB) discipline has the potential to make societal impact and help tackle grand challenges by providing and applying pertinent knowledge. This has sparked ongoing debates concerning the future research agenda in IB and the calls for closer coupling between IB research and practice. This paper aims to improve our understanding of the extent to which IB research has made a high-quality impact on IB practice. We present a comprehensive evaluation of Impact Case Studies (ICS) with an IB focus submitted to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014 (REF2014) and 2021 (REF2021), offering a unique avenue to evaluate the key characteristics and evolution of how submitting UK universities have presented their ‘best’ cases of high-quality impact connected to IB research. This evaluation enables the development of novel insights into key characteristics of high-quality impact from IB research that have policy implications for universities leaders aiming to understand and boost impact related work in their institutions, policymakers related to University-industry collaboration and future ICS authors.

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