Business has a vested interest in maintaining an educational sector that is responsive, in touch, and contemporary. Otherwise, the educational institutions will drift away in directions that will not serve the best interests of business practitioners. Thoughtful business leaders can make a critical difference by suggesting research topics, sponsoring research projects, and facilitating research. Clearly, academic research suffers from alarmingly low levels of executive participation. Researchers have a very challenging task in getting managers to respond to requests for data collection and interviews.
Response rates are at an all-time low.
While, business executives cannot be blamed single-handedly for low rate of response in surveys, it is important to understand that they can play a proactive role in influencing what gets researched, how it is researched, and what the fruits of this research will be. Of course, business-education collaboration can go beyond research sponsorship and facilitation. These and similar initiatives in business-education partnership will go a long way in closing the existing gap and in positioning ourselves as a formidable competitor. I look forward to receiving any thoughts our practitioner and educator readers may have on this topic. Despite substantial research on international sourcing by manufacturers and the rapid development of international sourcing channels by retailers, both conceptual and empirical studies on international retail sourcing have been few and far between.