Business schools are quietly shifting from knowledge creation to knowledge curation, repackaging existing research through case studies, white papers, and executive programs. This article examines whether that shift represents a pragmatic adaptation to the pace of modern business or an abdication of the university’s core intellectual purpose.
| 18 mo. | ~$4B | $45B |
| Avg. submission-to-publication lag, business/economics journals¹ | Annual cost of US business school research (est.)² | Global executive education market, 2024³ |
Fifty years ago, a business school was a place where genuinely new ideas about capitalism were generated. Ronald Coase’s transaction cost economics. Michael Jensen and William Meckling’s agency theory. Michael Porter’s competitive forces framework. These were not summaries of prevailing practice; they were the intellectual architecture that business later structured itself around. The professors who built them spent years in productive vagueness before their ideas escaped the journals and entered the boardroom.
That era has come to an end. knowledge creation is now replaced by the packaging of what others have already discovered – knowledge curation. The rebranding of the already-known, the case study written about last year’s hot company, and the executive education module on artificial intelligence, designed and delivered before any serious empirical research on AI governance exists to teach.
This creates a real controversy, even if it’s rarely discussed openly in faculty meetings. Has the business school stopped being a true part of the university and instead turned into nothing more than an expensive content aggregator?
The Publication Pipeline Problem
Research in business and economics takes an average of 18 months from submission to publication in a peer-reviewed journal, twice the lag recorded in natural sciences. Excluding the time required to design a study, collect data, and survive multiple rounds of revision, and the gap between the problem a paper studies and the moment it enters a classroom can approach four to five years.
That pace mismatch is not new, however, in practice the acceleration of business change has made it critical. The COVID-19 pandemic restructured global supply chains and remote-work norms within months. The emergence of large language models has overturned assumptions about knowledge work with similar speed. Decentralized finance, climate transition risk, platform regulation, each is a domain where organizations need conceptual frameworks now. The peer-reviewed pipeline is producing work that will arrive, if at all, years too late to inform the decisions currently being made. To fill this gap, curation takes over.
The Harvard Business School case method, still the dominant pedagogical form in elite MBA programs globally. The case method is, at its best, a form of narrative journalism where a close reading of a real situation designed to provoke discussion. At its worst, as the method drifts toward teaching Zoom’s pandemic pivot or Open AI’s governance crisis. It eventually becomes stylish current-events commentary with an expensive course packet.
The Thought Leadership Trap
Beyond the case method, a broader ecosystem of “thought leadership” exists. White papers, practitioner-facing articles, and podcast series that synthesize existing research without adding to it. The genre is defined by its audience, senior practitioners who want conclusions without methodology, and its economics are attractive. Thought leadership requires no peer review, no novel data, and no prolonged uncertainty. It requires a recognizable institutional brand, a readable voice, and a topic that feels urgent.
There is a genuine social function in translating academic research into language executives will actually read. The problem arises when translation becomes substitution, when the institution stops generating primary knowledge and survives by recirculating and rebranding the work of others.
“Business school research frequently prioritizes topics that can be published easily over those that really matter to stakeholders.”
– Haenlein, M., & Jack, A Kohli & Haenlein (2021), International Journal of Research in Marketing5
The executive education market, valued at approximately $45 billion globally in 2024 and growing at roughly 11 percent annually, is where the curation model thrives most openly. Programs with names like “Competing in the Age of AI” are, in many cases, well-curated tours of existing literature and practitioner insight delivered by faculty whose published research may be indirectly related to the topic. The model generates revenue that cross-subsidizes the peer-reviewed research the same institution struggles to translate.
Research as Retrospective
A thoughtful counterargument position may hold that the appropriate role of research is retrospective. its real job is to codify, critique, and rigorously test what practitioners have already figured out, not to predict or lead the way. The peer-review process exists precisely to separate the durable signal of what works from the noise of what is merely fashionable.
There is real intellectual weight here, for example, Coase’s transaction cost paper, now foundational to industrial organization, was published in 1937 and largely ignored for three decades before it reorganized the theory of the firm. But this argument is harder to sustain when the research being produced is not careful retrospective inquiry into lasting questions but studies selected for their publishability rather than their importance. A 2024 analysis found that business school research “frequently prioritizes topics that can be published easily and frequently over those that really matter to stakeholders,” with the estimated cost per published article reaching $500,000, including faculty salaries, doctoral student support, research assistants, data acquisition, journal submission fees, administrative overhead, and institutional infrastructure, and the aggregate annual cost of US business school research approaching $4 billion. That is a substantial amount for an activity whose outputs practitioners rarely consult and whose topics are partly chosen for their amenability to statistical analysis.
What Genuine Contribution Requires
The direct version of the critique is not that business schools should be faster; they should be braver. The topics where original work is most urgently needed, AI governance and accountability, the organizational sociology of hybrid work, the systemic risks embedded in decentralized finance, the economics of climate transition, are the domains where the standard social-science methods (quantitative models, historical data, controlled settings) are least effective and the risk of publishing something prematurely embarrassing is highest.
Taking those risks is what separates a research university from a mere aggregator. It is what justifies the institutional independence, the job security of tenure, and the public funding that business schools ask for and receive. A school that avoids those risks in favor of careful retrospective studies and curated summaries of what practitioners already know is not exactly wrong.
The same growth in executive education that brings revenue to business schools is also funding platforms like Coursera, Emeritus, and a rising number of corporate universities—all of which curate and deliver knowledge at a fraction of the cost. If curation is the main product, the competitive advantage is thin. The institutions that will matter twenty years from now are those producing the ideas that everyone else will eventually package and sell.
About the Author
Dr. George Sammour is an associate professor of Business informatics at Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT), Jordan. Dr. Sammour has published more than 50 research articles in International peer reviewed journals and meetings. He is a member of several International accreditation advisory councils and boards for MENA region.
End Notes
1. Björk, B-C. & Solomon, D. (2013). The Publishing Delay in Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Journals. Journal of Informetrics, 7(4), 914–923. Business/economics journals recorded an average submission-to-publication delay of 18 months, compared with 9 months for chemistry.
2. Lim, W.M. et al. (2024). Measuring the Long-Term Impact of Business School Research on Academia, Teaching, Society and Decision Makers. Research Policy. Cites Kaplan (2023) on estimated cost per article (~$500,000) and total annual US business school research cost (~$4 billion); and Kohli & Haenlein (2021) on topic-selection bias.
3. Research and Markets / GlobalNewsWire (2024). Executive Education Programs — Global Strategic Business Report 2023–2030. Global market valued at $42.5 billion in 2023, projected at $98.6 billion by 2030 (CAGR 12.7%); consistent with independent 2024 estimates of approximately $45 billion.
4. Kohli, A.K. & Haenlein, M. (2021). Factors Affecting the Study of Important Marketing Issues: Implications and Recommendations. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 38(1), 1–23.
5. Haenlein, M., & Jack, A. (2024). Measuring the long-term impact of business school research on academia, teaching, society and decision makers. International Journal of Research in Marketing. Advance online publication.
