Keynote – Bridging the gap between research and practice: what should YOU be doing about it?

This article is part of a special series of summaries of keynotes and presentations from the KM Triversary Forum 2025.

Setting the scene

Knowledge management is something that people have been doing for millennia: the builders of the pyramids in Egypt must have done it, and First Nation Australians have been actively preserving their cultural knowledge for tens of thousands of years. However, it only acquired its name in the second half of the 20^th century, becoming widely known in the 1990s, and emerging as an academic subject area in the process. Before I go any further, I need to clarify that by knowledge management, I mean anything that the people doing it or writing about it say is knowledge management (KM). This is not a cop-out, but a reflection of the lack of consensus on a definition of KM.

Back in the 1990s, there was not much of a gap between research and practice. Many early research publications on KM, especially the most-cited ones, examined what the pioneering organizations were doing. But as time went on, KM research and practice began to separate. Research turned more towards incremental improvements than ground-breaking ideas; practice couldn’t keep up with all of these so-called improvements, and tended to miss the useful bits as well as the boring ones. That meant less practice involvement in research activities, and the research infrastructure of KM journals, courses, conference series etc. began to take on a life of its own. As a result, the strongly problem-driven research of the 1990s was gradually squeezed out of the academic literature, and a “valley of separation” developed between research and practice.

The rest of this article is based on thinking about who works in KM, and what they can do to help bridge the gap between research and practice.

Identifying KM roles

The Figure below shows some of the most common roles associated with KM, put on a spectrum running between research and practice. The roles start with the Doer and Observer, and then become more specialized.

It is important to avoid the temptation to map the research roles to academics and the practice roles to practitioners. Doing that is perhaps the biggest issue in the “separation” – what people think their role is. Nearly all of the roles can be done by both academics and practitioners, in fact must be done by a mixture of both, to keep the field really healthy and influential. If academics and practitioners both work across the research-practice gap, then it will naturally close.

The highlighted roles in the Figure are those that I believe have the greatest potential to help bridge the research – practice gap. But what should they do?

A call for action

The observer/explainer should pay more attention to the practice of KM, rather than the models KM researchers have built. Too often, recommendations for practice in research papers are things that are easy to say but much harder to do, like “create a knowledge sharing culture”. The observer/explainer should also talk to the doers, and not just send them surveys to complete. Crucially, they should also be prepared to invest time and resources in doing longitudinal studies to learn about, and demonstrate, the true value of KM.

Moving on to the enablers, they should talk up the benefits of knowledge management – not ignoring the obstacles, but not leading with them. They should also support the doers both internally and externally. Academic Deans can be key enablers by encouraging KM researchers to engage more with practice: this fits in well with the “research impact” agenda now being promoted in several countries.

The enabler role overlaps somewhat with that of catalyst. The catalyst should “plant a thousand seeds”. Yes, some of them will not “flower”, but the more widely KM is practiced, the more it will achieve. They should also bring together people from diverse backgrounds: as Granovetter (1973) said “we learn more from our weak ties.”

The authors/editors/webmasters (sorry, but I can’t find a suitable non-gendered term for that last one, nor for ringmaster) should write of real practice – warts and all. Most importantly, there should not be an expectation, let alone a requirement, that articles should be written in standard academic research style. And it would help a great deal if authors, especially academics, were to submit their best work to KM journals, not those in other disciplines.

Last, but far from least, the translator’s main role is to explain the concepts of knowledge management to those who do not know about it – and probably do not know why they should know about it. This spreading of understanding, at appropriate levels, is classic boundary-spanning work.

And there is one thing that everyone in KM should do: acknowledge “failures”, but learn from them.

In conclusion

Rather than a gap to be bridged, perhaps it is more helpful to think in terms of a gap to be filled, so that there is once again no divide between KM research and practice.

It’s all about action, so everyone in KM should try to do something. Above all, talk to each other within knowledge management (professors – that’s what “professing” means!), and to those outside the field.

Biography:

John S. Edwards is Professor of Knowledge Management at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. His research interests have always centred on how and why people use – or don’t use – models and systems to help them do stuff. Most recently he has concentrated on knowledge management and related topics such as risk management and business analytics. He was the founding editor of the journal Knowledge Management Research & Practice, and has written many publications on knowledge management, including – as co-author – “The Knowledge of Communities” (Emerald, 2025).

Presentation resources: PowerPoint slides and video recording (coming soon).

Header image source: Author provided.

Artificial intelligence (AI) statement: AI was not used in preparing this article.

References:

Edwards, J., & Lönnqvist, A. (2023). The future of knowledge management: an agenda for research and practice. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 21(5), 909–916. https://doi.org/10.1080/14778238.2023.2202509.

Granovetter, M.S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.

Hasan, H. (2008). Back to the future for KM: the case for sensible organisation. Knowledge Management Research & Practice, 6(1), 26-30. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.kmrp.8500158.

Liebowitz, J. (2001). Knowledge management and its link to artificial intelligence. Expert Systems with Applications, 20(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0957-4174(00)00044-0.