How to Fast-Track Your Academic Career

How to Fast-Track Your Academic Career

Professor Adam Lindgreen, together with his colleagues professors C. Anthony Di Benedetto, Joëlle Vanhamme, and John Nicholson, has written a new book on the challenges faced by researchers pursuing an academic career.

The idea for this book can be traced back to Adam and Tony’s desk at Industrial Marketing Management. They are the Co-Editors-in-Chief of this journal, and they set out to write a series of short editorials aimed at providing guidance on writing and revising research manuscripts to the early- or mid-career business-to-business marketing academic. Working with Peter LaPlaca (former long-time editor of Industrial Marketing Management) and some of the leading authors appearing in that journal, a couple of editorials on successfully writing and revising articles appeared in the pages of Industrial Marketing Management in 2018. As the idea grew, it was clear that there were many other academic career challenges to be faced, as well as many opportunities specific to the business-to-business marketing scholar, and very few resources available for specific guidance or insight.

We thought about challenges faced by all of us in academia: successfully applying for grants, doing research with colleagues from other departments, supervising Ph.D. students, and even finding a balance between teaching, research, and service. We also considered how many of these challenges are confronted by those specifically in business-to-business marketing. We tend to do very practical research, on topics of great interest to business managers and decision makers, and many of the research studies published in Industrial Marketing Management and other business-to-business marketing journals have immediate, useful managerial implications. Thus, while all career researchers occasionally face the academic-practitioner divide (the familiar “relevance versus elegance” dichotomy), business-to-business marketing researchers have the advantage of working on problems of inherent importance to managers making decisions related to inventory management, supply chain, innovation investment, and similar concerns.

Further, the business community is a source of ideas for future research projects that can be tapped more efficiently by building greater cooperation between academia and management. In addition, since business-to-business marketing academics are frequently working on research projects that directly address business decision issues, some of our most recent publications can potentially be turned into lectures or teaching cases, increasing our effectiveness when we are facing, say, MBA students demanding relevant and timely course content. We tried to incorporate overall issues, as well as specifics that are of relevance to the business-to-business marketing academic community, throughout the chapters of this book.

Ultimately, we have tried to deliver here a book, which addresses the concerns and challenges faced by the early- or mid-career business-to-business marketing academic, but which will also add value for our academic colleagues in business schools across the board.

In summary, and originating from our editorials published in Industrial Marketing Management, as well as some work published in The Marketing Review, the 20 chapters and two appendices in this book reflect the following main topic parts:

Part 1: Getting Started;

Part 2: Generating Ideas and Setting Up for Success;

Part 3: Working with Students;

Part 4: Getting Published; and

Part 5: Being Relevant