Conferences can play a key role in bridging the real-world research impact gap. Recent global management and research impact conferences, such as the 2026 Academy of Management Conference in Philadelphia and the 2026 AACSB-AOM Research Impact conference in Dublin, Ireland, have highlighted this need. But very few dedicated conferences explicitly set out to address it.

TASIC 3.0 — the Asia-Pacific Scholarly Impact Conference — is designed to bridge the academy-practice gap. It is modelled on the principles of engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007; Hoffman, 2016, 2021). Engaged scholarship can be understood as a process by which the academy and the world of practice (the ‘field’) co-create and apply knowledge to solve real-world problems.

The Engaged Scholarship Model connects the Academy, through insights and latent innovation, with Practice/Field, where innovation is realised and impact is created, through two pathways: translation and co-creation.

The Translation Pathway (Academy to Practice/Field)

This pathway addresses how academic insights are communicated, interpreted and applied in practice. The academy must recognise that knowledge does not automatically diffuse across professional boundaries. To cross over into the field, academic artefacts such as PRJ articles need to address the world of practice in ways that go beyond motivating a study through a “gap in literature” and a cursory, generic “implications for practice/policy” section.

Teaching cases, too, must have the pedagogical potential to shift future leaders' mental models in the classroom, motivating participants to become downstream ‘carrier waves’ of strategic action in the field.

The Co-Creation Pathway (Practice/Field to Academy)

This pathway represents the ongoing feedback from the outside world back to the academic core. Innovation often emerges directly from practitioners in the field, whose lived operational friction is a generative source of insight. Through collaborative co-creation, the academy can interpret this field-driven friction, translating messy, real-world dilemmas into clean, rigorous theoretical questions with practical implications.

The tenets of engaged management have mostly been adopted by niche platforms such as the Executive DBA community, through its annual Engaged Management Scholarship (EMS) Conference. TASIC 3.0, however, believes the principles of engaged management, together with a nine-dimensional impact taxonomy, can be applied by the mainstream academy to bridge the academy-practice gap.