Accelerating Scholar-Practitioner Collaborative Research Through Speed Consortium Benchmarking

A major obstacle in scholar-practitioner collaboration in research has been summarized by the rigor versus relevance debate. This paper addresses a third issue: speed. There is a difference in clockspeed in the two worlds. Practitioners often need urgent solutions to their problems whereas scholars might take years to execute their research. We propose a research methodology to reduce the clockspeed problem, thereby bridging the gap between practice and academia in knowledge transfer and knowledge production. This paper has four goals: 1) to provide suggestions to address the clockspeed problem in scholar-practitioner collaboration, 2) to introduce speed consortium benchmarking - combining the world cafe variant of focus group research and consortium benchmarking - as a research methodology to address the speed problem, 3) to introduce some alterations to the world cafe method in order to increase its academic rigor and 4) to illustrate the application of speed consortium benchmarking with an example from...