Emerging from the lecture hall where a presentation on an academic research paper had just finished, a delegate at the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association’s (Ipsera) conference in Canada was asked what she thought. “They need a reality check” was the muttered answer.

It was a response that many would consider unfair, but it is typical of some thinking in the purchasing and supply management fraternity. As the conference in the picturesque surroundings of the University of Western Ontario drew to a close, it was worth asking: at the beginning of this new millennium, after nine years of Ipsera’s trying to promote networking between purchasing professionals and academics, how far have we come?

Are we any nearer to a purchasing Shangri-la, where academics and practitioners can talk to each other to their mutual benefit?

There’s no shortage of research going on. Most of the 200 or so delegates at the conference were academics from universities - mainly from North America and Europe, but there was even a sprinkling from Japan, South Africa and other places further afield. For two and half days, experts presented papers on every aspect of purchasing and supply management to their audiences of fellow academics and industry professionals.

They were listened to respectfully and faced a series of probing questions after their presentations. There was no obvious lack of enthusiasm for the wide-ranging work being done. So why the undercurrent of criticism that too much research is disconnected from reality, has little relevance to industry, and merely serves the interests of the academics?

Probably the most vocal critic of the role academia has played in the evolving study of purchasing and supply management so far is self-styled “subversive” Jon Hughes, senior partner at the Windsor Foundation and a well-known figure in the purchasing community. Only a tenth of the research being conducted is of any real value to business, he told the Ipsera conference.

Hughes has a foot in both the academic and practitioner worlds, as he is also a visiting lecturer at the Centre for Business Strategy and Procurement (CBSP) at the University of Birmingham and two European universities. Nevertheless, his criticism of academia is blistering. “On balance, academic research isn’t much use,” he told SM. “It’s introspective and introverted. It’s not focusing on the key issues. It’s failing to deal with the real needs of rapidly changing corporations.

“Most researchers are focusing on the micro-skills of purchasing, rather than looking at the bigger picture. Chief executives and senior managers want to know what contribution supply chain management can make to their businesses. They don’t care about all the trivia that Ipsera goes in for. It’s very nice to come here and have all these discussions, but is the research relevant? I don’t think so.”

But among other practitioners, or at least those who attended the conference, views are less extreme. Roxanne Sutton, director of strategy at the NHS’s Purchasing and Supply Agency - who has worked extensively with fellow delegate Christine Harland, senior research fellow at the University of Bath’s Centre for Research in Strategic Purchasing and Supply - told SM: “We’re absolutely committed to working with academics. The insights that come from the academic community are extremely valuable because they can help us to structure our observations and analyse what’s going on.

“Often you don’t think about what’s happening, you get bogged down in what you’re doing. The academic approach is a way of reflecting on things and looking at them from a different perspective.”

Another delegate, Frans Dijkman, group director of corporate purchasing at Philips in the Netherlands, said: “The gap between academics and practitioners is mainly the fault of the practitioners. Academic research can make a big difference to the way you operate.”

Gap years

This gap between academics and practitioners has concerned the leaders of Ipsera, an organisation specifically set up to bring the two camps together, for at least four years. Now they have taken steps to give professional managers a louder voice at the annual conference. At next year’s gathering in Sweden, practitioners are being invited to submit topics for discussion at sessions that they will lead. And some of the main themes chosen for next year’s event, such as buying services, purchasing for small and medium-sized enterprises, the retail sector and project-based industries, have been picked partly as a way of attracting more interest from the world at large.

The move coincides with attempts by CIPS, which is affiliated to Ipsera, to bring researchers and practitioners closer together. A paper presented to this year’s conference by Marc Day, CIPS’s research manager, and Roy Ayliffe, its director of professional practice, explored the problem.

Output from academic institutions, they argue, has often been “underused, misunderstood or misinterpreted”, but academics aren’t to blame. Some research, they say, must be “blue skies” - of no obvious use or relevance, but important to ensure a good foundation for building what critics like Hughes want to see, a robust body of knowledge. Some should be carried out with a view to possible use, while applied research should be of immediate use.

Overall, Day and Ayliffe stress that all three types of research are important and academic standards should not be lowered to allow for some spurious notion of relevance. Indeed, they argue, it is unlikely that there is any one definition of “relevance”. It varies from one user to another. The problem, they suggest, lies in the failure to disseminate the knowledge generated by academic research. The codified language of academia is at the heart of the problem and ways of translating it for practitioners must be found.

However, the way in which research is conducted could also be improved, say the CIPS pair. A research project that Day himself conducted in the ceramics industry involved regular meetings with the sponsors to inform them of the results in progress. They didn’t have to wait two years until it was finished.

Above all, says Day, he wants to get away from the idea that practitioners and academics are separate groups. In practice, he says, they are intermingled. The real issue is how much access there is to research and how it is put to use. He told SM: “The language that academics use often blocks practitioners out. It turns them off. To academics, it’s very important to be precise in their terminology, but they should be able to translate it into language that practitioners can grasp.

“The generation of knowledge takes a long time, and we’ve really only just started to understand some of the fundamental issues in purchasing and supply management. But it’s clear that academia has an invaluable role to play in helping clarify extremely complex situations that practitioners often find themselves in.”

The steps being taken by Ipsera and CIPS to narrow the gap between the two worlds should start to produce results before long, but practitioners must not expect an immediate impact. As consultant Christopher Bouverie-Brine, former director of Birmingham’s CBSP, says: “If purchasers come to this sort of conference expecting a quick-fix solution to take back to their businesses and put into practice straight away, they will be disappointed.

“The ones who gain from this kind of gathering are those who take the time to understand what academic research is about and are prepared to think about the emerging insights from the studies that are being done.”