(Industry, Academia, Research and Journals)
Data Scientist, Databases, Data Lake, Predictive Analytics, Data-driven decision making, and Research have been some of the most talked-about topics in Industry, and Academia. Journals provided over the years the platforms where some of these came as an output.
While Industry has been shying away from deep research in the name of being practical and application-oriented, Academia has been mostly filled with people who hardly ever experienced the problems on the ground.
Academia had a deep disrespect for Industry research as something which is biased and doesn't follow the rigorous methodology.
Industry reciprocated this deep disrespect for academia by smiling at fictional research models being studied with deep rigour so that it can pass the test of academic journals and in turn, academicians grow in their career by meeting the publication requirements. These journals were hardly even been referred by industry practitioners.
Industry practitioners also published their so-called research output in popular business journals. They boast of these articles as something which is understandable in a common layman language by practitioners.
These journals couldn't even cross the entry gates of leading academic institutions. The divide has been so deep that they don't even consider them useful for their dustbins.
Then there has been some industry practitioners with their peacock feathers, who didn't read these Indian Journals. They loved their HBR, Money, Wired, Bloomberg and FORBES.
One questions which emerge from here is why this space has never been filled by Indian Journals?
India has seen a number of business journals over the years, some of them really started well.
Some of the common events happened with all of them:
1. Some of them started well 2. Their local presence put a lot of pressure on them from publishing hungry industry practitioners 3. Initially, they published good content 4. The pressure to spread fast and win subscriptions fast led to publishing articles written by ghostwriters (provided by the publisher and at times found by decision maker) in the name of leading decisions makers, 5. Journal gets subscription, even when quality keeps on deteriorating. 6. In the end, the Journal becomes a platform to host industry conferences and cocktail parties. 7. And the cycle of deterioration continues.
How to stop this downward spiral?
1. Academia must introspect and promote practitioner-oriented research 2. Industry honchos should become little grounded, and stop thinking that their organization is not the elixir of knowledge in a specific area. 3. Both parties must encourage rigorous double-blind, peer-reviewed journal. 4. Industry honchos should be comfortable to subscribe to a journal which rejects their advances/pushes of publishing their pictures.
Bridging of this divide is crucial for India and its ambition to become a VishwaGuru. This will be win-win for all stakeholder in this (Academia, Industry, Researchers and Journals). This will drive out mediocre journals which thrive on industry conferences and giving space to EGOS of industry honchos.
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