Our goal is to rethink the role and responsibilities of business in creating a sustainable society. As part of this mission, we publish the #thinklist - a list of faculty thinkers on social media who focus on issues of responsible and sustainable business.

The #ThinklistImpact, focusing on academics who influence practice, was selected as the topic of our next thinklist after polling CBOS’ twitter followers. We want to highlight this group in the hope that public recognition helps validate those who prioritise impact in their work, as well as helping to create a definition of an 'impact scholar'.

What is impact?

Research impact means many different things to different people. In simple terms, we can understand research to impact practice when new knowledge influences or directly changes the way things are done or thought about in management practice outside academia. But that has many nuances.

For the purpose of the #ThinklistImpact, an ‘impact scholar’ was interpreted as a person or collective who does one or more of the following:

• Connects research to practice, whether through consulting or collaborating with business or civil society, providing training to organisations, or writing books and media articles that directly target stakeholders outside academia and which seek to inform practice.
  
• Participates in public discourse, and shapes what and how things are discussed in the public sphere, e.g. through translation and mobilization of academic scholarship.
  
• Is involved in decision making around responsible business, for example by working with policy makers or sitting on boards.
  
• Seeks to bring about some sort of tangible change to professions, including the way that impact is recognised and valued within academia, or how other professions are trained, examined, and credentialed.
  

However we acknowledged that this definition likely fails to take into account all forms of impact, and so considered any candidates who could show impact outside of these categories. However as the #thinklist is a twitter list, a key aspect of inclusion was that the scholar or group had to talk about or show evidence of impact on social media.

The #ThinklistImpact