The purpose of this paper is to examine the “lost in translation” issue in management research, focusing on how strategic entrepreneurship research translates theoretical insights into actionable implications for practitioners. While management articles routinely include a section on practical implications, the authors explore the extent of these implications in guiding practitioners’ knowledge and decision-making.
The authors conduct a qualitative meta-analysis of 232 articles published in a leading entrepreneurship journal over the past decade. Each article’s practical implications section is coded along several characteristics of practical implications. The authors then synthesize patterns through link analysis and co-occurrences.
The findings of this study differ across various practical implication characteristics. The authors find that articles often look to extend managers’ knowledge (56.50%) of the phenomena of interest (change the way practitioners think) and give actionable (36%) steps for solutions to problems (change the way practitioners act). To a lesser extent, scholars also provide a fair number of novel practical implications (18.70%), such that they possess counterintuitive results and are generalizable (16.30%) to many contexts.
The authors offer guidelines for scholars, editors, reviewers, entrepreneurs, managers, policymakers and universities aimed to enhance the relevance of academic findings for real world impact. By improving the clarity and applicability of academic insights, this framework can foster more effective entrepreneurial decision-making, drive innovation adoption and ultimately strengthen economic development and societal welfare through better informed management practices.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first qualitative meta-analysis to deconstruct and evaluate the substance of practical implications in management research. The authors propose a coding framework for future studies to explore theory-to-practice knowledge pathways across management fields, ultimately aiming to bridge the gap between academic research and its real-world applications.
