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"We're encouraging faculty to really look at the big organizational problems, the daily management and public policy challenges that organizations face." —Kathleen Sutcliffe, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan corporate finance. There has been a transformation in what is being studied and how it's being studied." Journal publication and the peer review process remains of utmost important to faculty, Sutcliffe notes. But as more business schools base their missions on helping business solve its immediate challenges, business faculty are viewing their research in a larger context. "Research has changed over time, and business faculty have to think about the impact their research will have," says Sutcliffe. "We're encouraging faculty to really look at the big organizational problems, the daily management and public policy challenges that organizations face." Strategies for Research Outreach Many schools are building concerted marketing strategies to disseminate their research. Whether in print or online, they're reaching larger numbers of people and speaking the lan- guage of the media. The following examples are just a few of the ways business schools are getting the word out about their faculty's best work: n The Perfect Postcard. Journalists are often inundated by information, so it may take more than a press release to get their attention. To make sure its research makes an impact with reporters, the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza Col- lege of Business in Indiana publishes six postcards a year and sends them to approximately 1,500 news reporters, editors, deans, and others in the academic community. Each postcard highlights a faculty member's research that has a topical connection to current events. The front displays art and a teaser about the research; the back offers an explana- tion of the study and the contact information of the author. Mendoza College's research-oriented postcards aim to package research in a way that captures attention. "The post- cards make highly relevant faculty research on vital business topics available to those who write about or study real-world implications every day," says Carol Elliott, director of news- writing at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business in Indiana. "They educate and stimulate ideas and discussion, which is a large part of the Mendoza mission." n Link Leverage. Many business schools now include a "Faculty & Research" link on their home pages. But some, like the University of Michigan's Ross School, go one step further. Ross includes links to its "Faculty Research" and "Research Institutes and Centers" at the top of its Web menu, 28 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2007 Acts of Translation Perhaps the biggest shift in how business schools view—and use—their research is in how they communicate it. Statistical studies and technical jargon are well-suited to academic jour- nals, but less so for public consumption. The challenge for business schools is to translate those studies into a language that is immediately accessible to a large, diverse audience. Making an effort to translate the technical aspects of research into an accessible form is crucial to "establishing the critical link between real-life issues and research-based man- agement insights," says Peter Lorange, president of IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. "Too often, even those schools with before links to admissions, academic departments, or degree programs. "It was a deliberate choice," says Sutcliffe. "Our faculty are the major technological resource through which we do our work." n Site Seeing. Some b-school Web sites are being rede- signed with faculty research in mind. In March, the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business in Illinois will go live with a redesigned and expanded faculty research Web site, created in partnership with the Social Science Research Network (SSRN.com). "The changes enable visitors to down- load working papers written by our faculty. Other changes include updated faculty bios, but the research component is likely to be of most interest to site visitors," says Allen Fried- man, the school's executive director of communications. "This is an effort to make research more easily accessible to the general public." n Engaging Design. Business schools are also paying closer attention to online design, so that site visitors spend more time with their research—and make return visits. With that in mind, IMD recently launched an area of its Web site called "Tomorrow's Challenges." The page displays different-sized colored boxes, each containing a research topic. Users click on a specific box to read a summary of that study. "The boxes change size depending on the number of clicks they get," explains Els van Weering, research associate and proj- ect manager at IMD. "They indicate readers' interest in the topics as well as show off our latest research." n Electronic Outreach. Schools with well-established elec- tronic research newsletters have seen incredible growth in the number of their subscribers. Since The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia launched its research e-newsletter, Knowledge@Wharton, its subscriber base has grown to 800,000 subscribers worldwide. Stan-