The Future of Research in Higher Education: Insights from Naomi Boyd & Melissa Akaka

The conversation highlights how Daniels faculty are bridging academic scholarship with real-world challenges, connecting research to business practice, and preparing students to think critically and creatively. Boyd and Akaka share how data, partnerships, and technology -including artificial intelligence – are impacting how research is used, applied, and shared beyond the University of Denver campus. 

Transcript:

Melissa Akaka:

We have a responsibility to take our research out there into the world and help people solve problems.

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU Podcast. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Naomi Boyd, Dean of the Daniels College of Business, and Dr. Melissa Kaka, associate Dean for research and brand strategy in the Daniels College of Business to explore the evolving role of research and higher education.

Naomi Boyd:

I think that we have the responsibility to society to actually engage in a broad spectrum of research, thought leadership, practitioner oriented research, and then the really thoughtful, hard theoretical research that is trying to explain the foundational elements of our world

Joshua Ross:

At Daniels. That responsibility is reflected in the great work our faculty are doing every day from using data to uncover new market insights, to creating research that shapes industries and communities. This episode highlights not just their scholarship, but the impact it can have when shared beyond the University of Denver campus.

Melissa Akaka:

We have incredible faculty that are doing research and building knowledge with existing data and market data, especially around our accounting and our finance and our analytics faculty, having our researchers

Naomi Boyd:

Be an extension of the problems that these corporations are trying to solve, and them coming to us for our expertise because we have these incredibly smart people who are pushing the boundaries of what we know and they should be leveraged in a really meaningful way.

Joshua Ross:

Here’s my conversation with Dean Boyd and Dr. Akka, Dean Naomi Boyd, and Dr. Melissa Akka. Welcome to the entrepreneurship at DU podcast. Honored to have both of you in the studio and looking forward to our conversation.

Melissa Akaka:

Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks.

Joshua Ross:

Alright, so to start, I would like for each of you to introduce yourselves and share a little bit about your background and what led you to your current role here at the Daniels College of Business. We’ll start with Naomi.

Naomi Boyd:

Great, thanks for having me. So my background is primarily in finance, specifically derivatives market microstructure. While I was getting my PhD at George Washington University in finance and quantitative methods, I spent time working in the office of the chief economist, which then turned into eight years later still working on the regulatory side of the house. And it really formed the perspective I guess, that I have on capital markets. I was at the commission when electronification of capital markets happen. So a lot of my research has focused on structural shifts, bold innovation in capital markets broadly, and just understanding the price discovery and the mechanisms by which the markets work. I spent 14 years at West Virginia University in a variety of roles, leaving as an emeritus faculty member, but I guess what led me to my role here was really just a need. And I don’t think many faculty think that they’re going to get into administration.

In fact, usually we run from it because we really like teaching our students and we really like doing our research. But there was a need and I said, alright, I will step up to the plate for a year and see how this goes. And I will say at the end of that year, I felt like I made people’s lives better. And so I made a commitment to myself that as long as I was making people’s lives better, I would keep doing this. And here we are 12 years later and I was the dean of the college business at Virginia Commonwealth and then found Daniels. And I have to say I never thought I would love being a dean, but I really do. I love my job.

Joshua Ross:

And just really quickly, I know a lot about your background, I didn’t know a lot about that, but what were you doing as you were growing up? It was definitely not going towards finance.

Naomi Boyd:

No, it was definitely not going towards finance. My first career, I was a professional ballerina, so I actually have a BFA in dance and danced all growing up, went to performing arts, middle school and high school and obviously danced in college and beyond. And so it was an incredible career. I loved being a dancer. I think it actually taught me a lot about just multitasking. And most people think I do have more energy than the normal human, but I think that that just came from years of dancing, 12 hours a day and being in the studio and being on stage. But I’ve never actually spoke any words.

Joshua Ross:

Right, right, right. Well thank you Melissa.

Melissa Akaka:

So I grew up in Hawaii and I went to the University of Hawaii for my undergraduate degree in marketing. I’ve always been interested in marketing. At that time I worked in a surf shop and in sales and marketing I have a lot in common. And it was just really fun to watch how this culture revolved around a practice like surfing, but also so many pieces of markets and marketing were holding it together. And so I went into marketing, I thought that was fascinating, but at the end of my marketing undergraduate, I asked myself the question around what is the purpose of marketing and is it really about selling stuff to people? And I decided to go into nonprofit marketing for a couple of years. So ended up working for our visitors bureau and the Goodwill industries of Hawaii because I wanted to use my powers for good and not evil, so to speak.

And then I kind of got bored trying to figure out what marketing was within that lens. And so I went back for my MBA and there I met the person who ended up being my advisor for my PhD program. And he had just published a paper in 2004 about why marketing was not about selling stuff to people and why marketing was about how we create value together. And I said, this is so cool, why aren’t they teaching this in our MBA programs? And he said, well, do you want to study it? You need to get a PhD. So that’s led me down the PhD route where I went back to sort of my surfing roots and I studied the market of surfing, how it formed, how it evolved, and how the practice of surfing spread around the world. And so that has been something that has driven my interests around markets, cultures innovation from a research standpoint.

And when I came here to Daniels, I started at the University of Denver in 2012. And when I came here, people had no idea what I was studying, but they didn’t really care and they kind of just let me study what I wanted to study. And that has been the biggest gift I think academia has given me was to give me the freedom to ask hard questions and look for answers myself. Over time, I have stepped into some administrative roles and back to Naomi’s earlier point, I was not seeking out these roles, but opportunities came about and I wanted to have a bigger impact around programs and the student experience and not just inside my classroom, but to think about how students can evolve as they’re here for a year to four years depending on whether they’re undergrads or graduate students. So I oversaw the MS marketing program for a couple of years and created pathways around marketing because marketing is such a huge field that I think sometimes we need to be really clear about the types of job opportunities there are and there are many, everything’s changing now of course, but I think that’s what makes it exciting.

I stepped into the associate dean for research role specifically because I believe research is the heart of the university and that it’s not just publishing in our top tier journals that matter, it’s getting students excited and curious about questions they would not normally ask and spaces to have hard conversations around difficult answers.

Joshua Ross:

Well, thank you both. After hearing both of your introductions, I start to think about what have I been doing with my life? And Melissa, I didn’t realize your connection with surfing. I grew up in Santa Barbara with a very big surf culture. So we’ll to,

Melissa Akaka:

I’ll send you my dissertation. It’s 300 pages

Joshua Ross:

I’m in, I’m in. So actually that’s a great segue. You have both had success publishing and our focus today is on research. So how do both of you define research in the context of a business school versus basic science or humanities?

Naomi Boyd:

I mean, I think that the academy broadly, I agree with Melissa here to not only educate students, but it’s really to push the boundaries of what we know and it’s to create new knowledge. It’s to advance cultures and society and technology and medicine. And I think that the difference, it’s been interesting working at now three R ones one that became an R one while I was there because business schools have a really hard time figuring out how they fit into the research ecosystem. And it’s because the market makes our data. We don’t need to be in a lab creating the data. The market really makes our data and there are different pathways and mechanisms and we can get into qualitative versus quantitative research because when you’re talking about qualitative research, it’s more survey based. And so you are kind of creating the data by trying to extract it from humans or the market quantitative.

The market makes it right. And that’s primarily what I study in finance, but I think that it really just comes down to how you create the data and how you look at it. I think that we all look at different problems. Certainly we’re more interested in structural shifts and product market placement and how money flows really broadly and in business and whatever that looks like. And I think especially in the hard sciences, I mean they really are trying to advance the future of the world and studying what’s happening in different spaces. And to do that, they have to go out and they have to get a lot of money. So the extramural funding piece of research at a university is incredibly important, which is why sort of the shifting landscape for researchers right now is really challenging. And as an academic, it really honestly terrifies me to see really great scientists starting to question whether they want to stay in the research space or whether they need to shift just because they have to have that external funding source to really be able to create, again, create their data. So that would be I guess my take on the differences, but really we’re all here to push the boundaries of what we know today to advance society into the future.

Melissa Akaka:

Yeah, I totally agree with this idea that business schools have a different position in how we contribute to R one at a university. I think that we have incredible faculty that are doing research and building knowledge with existing data and market data, especially around our accounting and our finance and our analytics faculty. We do have experimentalists in this building who collect data and create experiments and design them to test human behaviors, but because we’re studying something that exists out there in the world, even when we bring it into a lab, it’s never as perfect as we might want it to be. So I think fundamentally though, from what’s the difference between business research and the rest of academia is really our tie to have managerial implications and to be able to create societal impact in our outcomes of our research. And we struggle with it because we have expectations around what we have to deliver from our research from an academic sort of trajectory.

But most faculty, if you talk to ’em in this building, want to be able to help manage or solve problems. They want to be able to change public policy, they want to be able to be in the field, so to speak in these markets and have an impact outward facing. And so there’s a tension right now, and honestly the need for it is only growing. So I think fundamentally the science itself, I think we’re social scientists at heart and that’s where we align with what’s happening in psychology, sociology, economics, and those types of fields. I agree, the heart sciences, they are in a situation right now where we really need to lean in and figure out how to support them. But business, we have a responsibility to take our research out there into the world and help people solve problems.

Joshua Ross:

My brother-in-law is a doctor of seismology, so we were just talking about the hard sciences and I’ve had a lot of discussions with him about research over the years as I’ve been trying to understand research and the way I kind of think of things is very black and white that you have to have a problem that you’re trying to solve and you go research to do that. And he’s been very clear to me. He’s like, that always shouldn’t be the case because a lot of times we don’t know what we’re trying to go solve. We’re doing research to see what potential problems are. And so as I started looking at this, I’m like, what does quality research look like in a business school and how is it evolving? So because in the past when we looked at quality research, it often meant publishing a narrow set of the top tier journals, but today can mean so many different things, real world relevance, cross-disciplinary work, sharing of data with your colleagues in the community and meaningful real world impact, what does it mean for you?

Naomi Boyd:

So I love this question. Awesome, because I think that it is really interesting to see the pendulum swinging. I think that our profession, early on in my career as a young assistant professor, it was as you said, it was so narrowly focused on can you publish in the top tier journals? And as things evolved and as competition grew in our field, things started to shift a little bit and we started to, in my opinion, we started to really get away from making true impact with our research. And I would review articles all of the time. I have multiple editorial positions, and I started to see this trend in just doing so many endogeneity tests and testing and double testing and triple testing that by the time you got to the end of an article, it had lost all of its essence. It had lost all of its impact.

And it was just page after page after page of equations, which I am a math nerd and I love math, but it really struck me as like, what are we doing here? And as a department chair, I was a department chair for almost nine years. My job was really to cultivate and to motivate and to mentor and shepherd these young researchers to guide them through this really journey of creating their own research profile. So I was very fortunate to also grow up in a department that really valued more of a portfolio approach. And that’s one of the reasons that I took the West Virginia job is that I wanted to look at different aspects. I started my career in economic development. I worked at a startup, I worked at a regulatory agency. So I got to see the realities of the business world and seeing these papers being written by academics who maybe had never even worked in industry but were so involved in the methods behind it, but not really, the storytelling sort of gave me pause honestly.

And so I started to kind of coin myself as a little bit of a cynical academic because I’m like, there’s so much more to what we’re doing here that could truly move and impact the market. And to Melissa’s point, really help me managers figure out how to create better run organizations and more efficiency and greater economic prosperity for our country and the world. And so I really look at it as a portfolio. I think that even the impact that we can make, and I talk about thought leadership all of the time, it doesn’t necessarily have to be based on the statistical methods behind the problem you’re trying to solve. It can simply be based on us having a conversation just like we’re doing right now on your life experiences and what you’re seeing as particular trends or shifts in the market that are important and relevant.

And then yes, the statisticians can take those ideas back and go through a rigorous process of testing them. But I do think that there’s a broad spectrum and I think that we have the responsibility to society to actually engage in a broad spectrum of research, thought leadership, practitioner oriented research. Then the really thoughtful, hard theoretical research that is trying to explain really the foundational elements of our world. And so I really lean into this idea that all research is important and if everyone can be engaged in some sort of research, however we classify it, we’re really advancing knowledge and creating

Melissa Akaka:

That impact. I agree. I mean I think that back to this need for curiosity in this world, we have a lot of technology that can do a lot of cool stuff now and can give us a lot of support in our efforts, but I think human curiosity is never going to be a wasted resource. And I think if we can build out more of that, and I think research helps us to do that, but we have to make space for it. And so this question about quality is actually a really good one because our traditional metrics of quality of research and academics are, especially in business, are around these journal lists that we want to publish in. But the acceptance rate for these journals are three 5%. So you’re talking about thousands of papers that don’t see the light of day go through this process through these journals.

And then there are different tiers of journals that’s still are high quality and are less restrictive in terms of publications. But even then, even if we get our research into all of these journals that we want to publish in, which is sort of our standard of quality so to speak from an academic standpoint, it still doesn’t get out there into the world. So quality I think is something that we’re struggling with from a, how do we define it standpoint right now, and then how do we define it with impact? So if we want research quality, high quality research and impact, we need checks and balances for the quality that we publish. Otherwise anybody can publish anything and call it science, and that’s problematic in its own. So I think the fields of business need to think through what does quality mean to them And in Daniel’s working on thinking about what does that mean?

And then back to your R one question, I do want to refer back to that just for one second because I think it matters here at the University of Denver. So we do have these R one institutions that are overseen by the Carnegie classification, but the American Council in Education and recently this designation for R one, the structure of how it’s designated has shifted. And prior to that, our university decided to think about how we could get to this R one status, but in a different way because we do have a lot of social sciences and we don’t have a medical school, which is usually where a lot of this extramural grant funding comes from. And so participating in this university actually for Daniel’s faculty, it is much more open. There’s a lot of resources on campus for Daniel’s faculty to think about how we can engage in research that matters. And grants and grants also tell us that somebody else out there is interested in what we’re trying to do. So rethinking our metrics around quality, what does it matter to people and how does it matter is something that I think we are talking through working on and that faculty here really care deeply about.

Joshua Ross:

So does a mission of the university change with R one? And I pulled this off the website under research. It says redefining research, reinventing possible at the University of Denver. Our research contributes to humanities understanding of the world, and by doing so serves the public good under that, they said this year there were 20 million in research awards, 36,307 citations and 258 principal and co-principal investigators. We are one of 187 R one institutions. Are our expectations higher now?

Melissa Akaka:

Absolutely. And I think that’s where we struggle because we are excellent teachers and we want to create student experiences that are meaningful and matter. And so the balance between our ability to do research at that level and continue to, especially if and when we want to bring in extramural funding, that takes a lot of time and effort and you need structures in place and resources. So it really is a balance around how can we think through being what it takes to be an excellent researcher and excellent in the classroom. And I think my opinion is that the answer comes down to collaboration and we need to figure out how to work better together across our units and understand the roles that people are playing in getting us to these reputational milestones because having R one status actually will also impact our enrollments. To have those kinds of reputational factors means a lot for the outside world, and there are reputation around our ability to create new knowledge or just be experts in our field even. And so I think that understanding how all these pieces fit together is critical now more than ever in order to be able to balance the excellence in research and teaching.

Joshua Ross:

Faculty often talk about the challenge of balancing teaching service and research from your respective roles because very different, but I bet there’s some crossover somewhere in there. How do you help faculty navigate these competing demands?

Naomi Boyd:

And they are demands. They are, as Melissa just spoke about, it’s when you’re working in an R one institution that has deep, deep commitment to not only the public good, but also to our students, it is a completely different ecosystem. And oftentimes at R one institutions, teaching goes away completely or is kept to a minimum because they’re so focused on the research side of the house Here at the University of Denver, we really value both. And it’s really around trying to make sure that we’re creating pathways for faculty to be successful. Because if you’re going to be a good teacher, it takes a lot of time. And especially at a school like DU where we have no more than 35 students in a class, most classes are even smaller than that. There’s a really high touch element to what we do and how we approach our pedagogy, which is incredible.

But because that takes an incredible amount of time and energy and effort, it does take away from the ability to really engage in our one level of research. And so I commend our faculty in so many ways because they’re doing it, they’re doing both, and they’re showing the world that both can be done. We can push the boundaries of knowledge at an R one institution and still really have this very individualized high touch approach in our classrooms. And I think that’s, I always talk about the magic of du. I really do feel like that is the magic of DU is we have faculty that are willing to work longer, harder and to really be excellent in everything that they do. But I think that we can also do a better job. And I think a lot of our chairs and directors that really is their job is to shepherd these young scholars through these times where they’re really trying to build the research profile.

And it does take intentionality. I’ve spent 15 years of my career talking to young scholars about the cadence of their research, when to hit submit, when to take that downtime to really dive deep into a problem. And when is there data heavy time? When is there writing time? It really does. You have to have that intentionality around it, otherwise you won’t get anything done because one can overtake the other. And we have to be really careful and cognizant about mentoring young scholars through that process because research takes a lot of time. It takes a long time. And if you’re not really careful with it, then you’re not going to be publishing at the highest levels, which is our expectation.

Melissa Akaka:

And I think the efforts that we’ve been working on the last few years around just promoting the value of research, generally we’ve been featuring faculty, the types of research they do, and the questions that I ask them when I’m doing these interviews with them is not just what do you publish and where do you publish it, but what makes you interested in this in the first place? Because research is incredibly personal to these faculty. You can’t tell faculty what to study, which is back to sort of my own experience here is nobody ever told me what to study and that’s why I was relatively successful at it. And so the research that they do matters to them and they want it to matter to other people too. So when you start to talk to them about how do you engage students in your research, how do you take your research to the community?

How do you help people solve problems? What kind of other impact do you have? They get really excited about it. But back to Naomi’s point, the demands of tenure are real and the type of deep work that research requires I think is pretty difficult for people who don’t do it to understand, which is understandable in and of itself because it’s not everybody has to do this kind of work, but being able to just recognize the value of it. And I think R one helps recognize that there is both internal and external value to it. And then to think through what are some alternative structures that we can think about incentivizing rewarding faculty who are doing research, like bringing students into projects. We actually have a lot of great programs where if you are doing research with students, there’s funding for that at the university level, these grants and things, if you are able to secure external funding, there’s also support for that.

So there are avenues to do that. And I think in Daniel’s, because we’ve been so traditionally focused on publishing in these journals and using that as our primary metric of quality, back to your quality question where we’re currently working on thinking about how can we add other metrics to the mix so that we can think about what stage are you at in your career? What kind of professor are you, if you are a teaching faculty or POP, do you want to do research? Because if you do, I want to create space for that. So that’s, I think where we’re headed towards. It’s not easy because there’s a lot of back to our structures of expectations and demands on us for teaching too. And we want to be good at everything and sometimes we have to figure out what those trade-offs are.

Naomi Boyd:

And I will also add, I think that it comes down to the division of work in any organization. I mean, I think higher ed is no different, that we have a lot of different people doing a lot of different types of work in our building. And it’s about leaning into what Melissa said around every faculty can participate to the extent that they either can or have a desire or have the background to do so. But we need faculty doing all kinds of different things because that’s what makes up the whole,

Speaker 4:

We

Naomi Boyd:

Need those scholars that are going to be doing the very basic science, the fundamental theoretical research, and then we need those faculty that are engaging with our corporate partners. And to me, I think that is really important here, especially at Daniels, is that we have this goal to be the most market connected business school in the United States. And the way that we’re going to do that is not just about bringing in live projects, which we do and doing immersions and having guest speakers. It’s really about having our scholars, having our researchers be an extension of the problems that these corporations are trying to solve, and them coming to us for our expertise because we have these incredibly smart people who are pushing the boundaries of what we know and they should be leveraged in a really meaningful way. And so that’s something that I’m really excited to see with the changing landscape of what we consider to be the funding mechanisms even of research, is that I think this time and space is actually a huge opportunity for the market to come to us and say, okay, how do we solve these incredibly hard problems that our industries are facing and really lean into the academy to be that partner.

Melissa Akaka:

This executive PhD program is designed specifically to people with extensive business experience who are curious, who want to think like scientists who can bring data to the table that we would never have access to before. And we have faculty that are interested in helping them get through this process so that we can solve problems. And I think that is an incredible opportunity for us to build out in a way that we can engage more people who are interested in really solving bigger when we think about the business problems that we solve. And so I run a research center too, the Consumer Insights and Business Innovation Center. And in that center, when we work with clients, we take a specific problem that the business problem they have, and we take a market segmentation problem, for example, and we will understand the two different markets that they’re looking at, figure out which one is most viable, do a market competitive analysis, and we help this business to solve that problem.

But if you take that three steps up into an academic realm, now we can come up with frameworks that can help many businesses solve their problems. And the work that we’re doing in entrepreneurship and studying entrepreneurs, I think will give us an incredible platform to talk to entrepreneurs about frameworks they can use that are not yet built because we studied what they’re doing. And so those are the kinds of pockets of really energizing research that we have going on here. And what we need to do is make sure that we have the right incentive structures in place in order to reward people for the work that they’re doing.

Joshua Ross:

I want to go back to something you said because this is the area that I still have trouble reconciling. You talked about faculty doing research in areas of their interest and their passion, but how do they really look at the market and say, is there value in the market? Because when we talk to entrepreneurs all the time, they’re passionate about a lot of things. They’re interested in a lot of things and they create things, but there’s no market for it. And if there’s no market for, there’s no customers, how do you look at that on the research side in terms of guiding them?

Melissa Akaka:

So I love this because this is something that I have been struggling with for the last year or so. How do we get these nuggets of insights that get published in a 25 page paper out into the world so that we can help people make decisions? Because you’re right, as an academic researcher, we are looking at our literature. We’re like, what are the problems that are not solved yet in our literature? How do we add to this body of knowledge? And it’s difficult to go back and forth between that and what does this one manager need today to understand how to make this decision? And so being able to translate, and there’s this area of translational science that I’m really trying to understand better, and it is how do we bring together this need to create a contribution to a body of knowledge that’s been around for 50, a hundred years where we’re making incremental contributions, which is really what academia is about, is making these incremental contributions to improving the model that we’re using to how do we take this problem that this person has or this community has and try to help them solve it?

And I actually think there needs to be a better bridge between those two. And so creating processes in place where we can have forums where we bring together the business owners, the managers, maybe our alumni to come in and talk about their problems, and we bring faculty in the room to talk about some frameworks they’ve studied or they’ve learned about, and then find those intersections with them together. So this comes back to the collaboration piece. I don’t think any of this can be solved on either and in a vacuum. And we really need to figure out as business schools how to create better spaces for this type of collaboration to occur. And I think that’s where centers come in and that’s where all of these different types of activities where we’re bringing businesses to the table to say, here are the problems I have, can you guys help me solve these? And then we have these brilliant faculty that are studying something so specific and now all of a sudden they’re like, yeah, actually this framework might help you answer that question or make that decision, but we need a place where that translation can occur. And that’s the trickiest part about this,

Naomi Boyd:

But I think it requires them coming to us, but us also going to them. The most impactful week that I have ever spent in my career was right before COVID and I went to New York and I spent a week on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange standing with the traders in their trading booth just asking them questions. And at some point they were like, we don’t know how to answer your questions, but we know who possibly can. And they sent me to Midtown Manhattan, and I sat on the trading floor at Bank of America, and I went to different trader’s desks, and I came back with not only so many questions that they had and so many issues that they were facing in the regulatory circles, but also so many just incredible insights into the way the work is actually being done. And so I also think that we need to have faculty internships where we’re embedding faculty in these businesses and just simply observing what is the work that is actually taking place.

And then conversely, I think that the academy so much on the regulatory and policy side of the house has gone away from actually having these deep, meaningful conversations with academia and with industry and policy is being made in a little bit of a vacuum. And so I’ve done a lot of work with corporate partners around trying to mitigate the risk associated with just bad policy. And I think a few years ago I took a step back and I was like, this is what the academy is for. The academy is for bringing together lawmakers, industry academicians students, just people in the community to come in and discuss really, really important societal issues and look at all sides of it. And so having that respectful discourse and pulling together all of those disparate viewpoints is going to actually lend itself to better policy that is going to advance society. So I think that those types of avenues to get to what are those nuggets of truth and what are those things that are really interesting but also are really relevant, is just really about forming those relationships and having those opportunities and those experiences to have not only these conversations, but also just to embed yourself in your world and in your profession.

Joshua Ross:

Well, I mean, right there is a cross section with research and entrepreneurship. What you did is you tried to understand the user’s problem, the start of design thinking, empathize with the user, understand the problem, and then try to go solve the problem. I’m a little jealous. That sounds like an awesome week, by the

Naomi Boyd:

Way. It was an awesome week. I still think about it.

Joshua Ross:

Alright, so there can’t be a podcast anymore without discussing artificial intelligence. And as we all know, artificial intelligence is disrupting so many different parts of society. And I want to understand from you both how AI is changing the way research is discovered, conducted, reviewed, and most importantly, I know there are challenges and I want to hear the challengers, but with every challenge, there’s also opportunities that come out and what are you seeing?

Melissa Akaka:

I actually think that AI might help us to bridge this sort of what has been a chasm between academic research and sort of practical tactical problems because I think academics are struggling just as much as managers are around what do we do with this technology? And there is a lot of back and forth. So I can give you an example. So I do a lot of qualitative research and I am teaching a consumer behavior class.

Joshua Ross:

Define qualitative, please.

Melissa Akaka:

So I do research where I seek out data that comes in a non-structured form. I do interviews, observations, ethnographies, those types of things generally for my academic research

Joshua Ross:

Doesn’t fit in a sweet little spreadsheet

Melissa Akaka:

Does not. But we, the question is a good question, right? Just because the data are qualitative doesn’t mean my methodologies are qualitative. I can take a large language model and have it pulled together very, very qualitative, unstructured information and structure it for me to the point where I could start to count how many times somebody said the word surfing in an article or in a copus

Of data. But I see where I see just kind of from a personal perspective around this type of research is qualitative research is really difficult to code and analyze manually. And so the emergence of AI actually provides a lot of cool tools that can help us figure that out. But I have had conversations with people who are doing this sort of in the field for Boston Consulting Group. There’s a woman that works now for a platform maybe she used to work for Salesforce and she’s a cultural anthropologist and they use a lot of AI technology to take interviews, to collect data, to analyze the data. But they will always come back to, you still have to have the skillset to do it. And so I think where the cross section is to say, if we can really think about AI as a tool and really think about how that tool helps us do our jobs better, and we take it back to research and say, how does AI help us do this research type of job better?

And I don’t have a lot of experience doing this with big data sets, but I am going to guess it’s a similar type of conversation being had. Then we can work together to figure out how this works moving forward. And then the work that we do can benefit each other, how we build out different methodologies, how we use AI to code qualitative interviews. Hopefully videos at some point would be really great, but at the backside of this, how do we train students to do this? Because you can’t just hand this tool to a person who doesn’t know how to use it and expect them to be able to have insights that are valuable, useful, and help you make decisions. So that puts that on us. Now we have a goal as an educational institution to say, we know how you’re using it, we can train people to use it in this way. And then the research that they do can either contribute impactfully outward to the communities, or we can think about how we can tie this back into our academic research and create new methodologies for other people to use. So I think there’s a really cool intersection that’s happening right there.

Naomi Boyd:

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that the benefit is going back to what we were talking about with there are only so many hours in the day and the exposition of research is so incredibly time consuming. I mean, academics literally sit there and read thousands, hundreds, or thousands of papers and then extract where we are at. Going back to that incremental knowledge creation, I think AI is an incredibly powerful tool in terms of efficiency and synthesis. I don’t think it’s a really good writer, and I think that it’s very obvious when people are using it as an initiator as opposed to a synthesizer. I use it all the time to pull together disparate presentations and articles and whether it’s popular press or academic in nature to get to the heart of and to just synthesize that information in a really nice and concise way.

I think it’s incredibly powerful. I also think I am a quantitative researcher, and because I’m a market microstructure researcher, my data sets are incredibly large and they’re incredibly cumbersome and incredibly hard to work with. And so I think that where AI comes into play is when you’re handling these really complicated data sets, it’s going to allow me to, I have a question, I need to verify it with the data, but it’s going to allow me to do it in a much faster way so that if I’m going down the wrong path, I can pivot and actually change directions. And so I think it’s going to advance knowledge in a lot of really meaningful ways, but there may be a lot of garbage out there. I mean, there may be a lot of AI produced research that we’re going to have to sift through, but I don’t look at it any different than the advent of the internet and fake news and everything else.

I mean, there’s a lot of noise out there, and I think that there will be a lot of noisy research that will eventually fall to the wayside, and then we’re going to be at this heart of really impactful, powerful, efficient research creation. It’s going to be really powerful. I’m excited to see where AI is going to really lead scholars to be able to advance things more quickly as opposed to, I mean, I had a paper that was literally 13 years in the making that we just kept updating and adding new data, and eventually it gets published. I’m like, oh my gosh, does this even matter anymore? I didn’t care about it anymore. Certainly. So I think that those long, long length questions and journeys in terms of research are going to be truncated. But that’s great because then it’s out there. It is more powerful. But then we’re going to have to call into question how we classify research and the tenure and promotion process. And because maybe instead of having six to eight journal articles, we’re going to have a hundred. I mean, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I think it will reveal itself in time and it’ll be iterative in nature. But

Joshua Ross:

Based on what you just said in terms of tenure and classifying research, will AI change the way we consider original research or how we evaluate contribution to research?

Melissa Akaka:

I hope that AI is used as a tool in academia, not as a creator of knowledge, honestly. I think we need humans to check that,

In my opinion, I guess. But I do think that the bars will change. The expectations around productivity will for sure change, but so will the expectations around impact. I do think AI is a good tool for us to think about how do we do this translation part of the process? AI is actually pretty good at recognizing an audience if you ask it to, if it has enough knowledge about that audience and being able to position my research paper, for example, towards that audience to give them insights for whatever problem they’re trying to solve. So if we can use it like that, I think actually from an impact standpoint, that’s more helpful. But I do think that we have to be careful about the knowledge creation part of it because new knowledge, I mean, my understanding of AI as it works is actually quite limited, but I think it’s based on past collection of data and being able to repurpose that data for different contexts essentially.

Joshua Ross:

But generating something new,

Melissa Akaka:

Generating something new, but it all comes from something that’s already existing. And so the whole point of science and this type of academic research and the creation of new knowledge is to create new understandings of the world. And so if we’re trying to generate it based on our old understandings of the world, I think we end up in a weird feedback loop.

Speaker 4:

So

Melissa Akaka:

I personally think academic research is what keeps universities relevant and necessary. And if we can bring students into being able to think that solve problems in ways that have never been solved before, that’s where the real value add is for these institutions.

Joshua Ross:

Do you have any concern with that? I mean, I totally appreciate and support what you just said, but it’s very competitive out there for tenure and recognition. This is another pathway to get to whatever that goal is a lot faster and

Melissa Akaka:

Oh, absolutely. There’s all kinds of concerns around anything outcomes of AI right now. So I think back to sort of the structures, the rewards and incentives that we have in place, we have to really think carefully about what behaviors are we rewarding? And if it is to publish 20 journals in five year articles in five years or whatever, we better really understand the behaviors that will lead to those outcomes in terms of technology usage. So I think there’s a lot of thought that has to get put into policies internally and more broadly around how we use technologies, but also even practices like how do we create norms where people appreciate this effort that we go through more manually? And the curiosity that it takes to come up with research questions on your own and really see things in the world as they are, I think that needs to be considered too.

Joshua Ross:

I like to talk about how faculty can build their brand with the research serving as that conduit. The outcomes as I look at it in my very short view, could lead to influence, influence for that faculty and the community and funding. They could get more funding as they build their brand differentiation in their field and who they are depending on what they’re focusing and personal financial opportunity as well. So my question, are faculty interested in this? And if so, how can faculty help make their research journey more visible and relatable to the public?

Naomi Boyd:

I think when we think about being a brand as a faculty member, we sort of turtle shell, right? We don’t really want it. We just want to sit in our spaces and have this deep thought and look at the problems and keep publishing the papers. But I do think the pendulum is swinging. And so much of what goes into being a tenured faculty member is really being known in your field is these faculty are experts. They’re experts in their field. And I think if we can shift the narrative around building their brand, it’s really just building their reputation, which we count and have counted for a hundred years. You have to get external reviewers who will evaluate you as a scholar in your field and write letters in either support or not in support of the impact that you’ve made. And so I just feel like if we think about us, think about ourselves as a brand, it’s really just thinking about ourselves as experts in our field and being able to vocalize that or having conduits to vocalize what the applicable portions of our research are, really changing the way that managers make decisions and the way that companies are built and the way that technologies are infused.

And so I think it’s really powerful and I think it’s really important for us to figure out what those conduits are and help faculty come out of their offices and into the main stage. And we have faculty here at the University of Denver that they speak on TV all the time, and it’s helping our brand and our visibility, but it’s also helping to establish them, to your point, as an expert in their field where companies can call on them individually and provide them with avenues and opportunities for participating in the market in different ways. It’s not just a, this is my one job, this is my portfolio of work, and this is how I’m leveraging it for institutional advancement, but also personal

Melissa Akaka:

Advancement. We are trained as academics to care about our reputation within our fields. So the American Marketing Association, for example, I need to be able to make sure that faculty that are representing all different universities when I go to these conferences, recognize who I am. They know the papers I publish, and that is what gets us tenure back to our incentive structures. We have to have these external reviewers recognize our work and recognize our expertise in the field to be able to move to get that type of promotion. But I think right now what we’re faced with is the need to recognize additional areas of impact. So not just academic impact and academic reputation, but our reputation more broadly. So reputation as an expert outside of academia is a broader scale, but also a different audience. And that’s where the challenge really lies, is to think about how can we promote our faculty as experts in the field with deep and legitimate expertise.

We’re not just talking about somebody who came up with an idea and publish a book. Lots of people that are doing that and they’re doing really well doing that, but we actually can speak to the fake news types of comments and provide evidence, empirical evidence for the arguments that we’re making, which is incredible. And that’s actually why the journalists come to us. They want to have some sort of legitimate voice in whatever piece that they’re working on, and they rely on us for that voice. But we need to think more broadly than participating in the conversations that are happening in the media and really demonstrate our expertise in different areas. And that’s what we’re trying to work on now, is to kind of identify where those pockets are and then create internal metrics to be able to recognize, incentivize and reward.

Joshua Ross:

I’m reading this book right now by Clayton Christensen on Higher Education, and he’s obviously known for his famous book, the Innovator’s Dilemma, but when he wrote it, it wasn’t famous, and I just learned this until he showed up on the cover of Forbes Magazine with Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and the CEO of Intel basically said, this is the Bible. And so you think back, and I don’t remember what year it was, but that was a channel, right? Print media. Now we have faculty building their brands through blogs, social media, podcasts. Are there benefits or potential challenges for business schools and the universities as these faculties create this kind of sustainable visibility?

Melissa Akaka:

Well, the challenge for the faculty is time, right? Back to Naomi’s point, we are doing the research, teaching our classes, probably serving on a few committees on the side. And the time it takes for us to put this together in a blog or do these interviews, even with media, especially if they’re in-person interviews, it just takes away from the other things that we need to be doing that we’re recognized and rewarded for. And so that from a faculty standpoint, that’s a challenge from, I guess from a Daniel’s college level brand standpoint. If faculty, this goes back to the AI conversation, it’s actually pretty easy for me to take a paper I published, throw it into chat, GBT, let’s say, and then it write a blog for me for marketing

Audiences out there or entrepreneurs. And sometimes it does a really good job and I could just kind of do a few edits and post it, and it’s good. Sometimes it doesn’t do a great job interpreting the types of research outcomes that I have. So that part of it I think is concerning from a sort of college level brand. When your faculty are out there, it’s like having influencers. You don’t know what they’re going to say. You dunno how people are going to react to what they say. And right now in this world, the types of research we do might actually have really big impact on the conversations that are being had in the world. And so we have to be careful, I think from a, as we build out the process and mechanisms to do this, because that’s where I hope we’re headed. Actually. I would love for our faculty to be famous. That would be incredible for them, incredible for Daniels, incredible for the University of Denver and for the students it would help with enrollments. But at the other end of that, we have to do it in a way that we have these feedback loops and checks and balances so that we’re doing it responsibly.

Joshua Ross:

All right. My final question, what gives you the most hope about where academic research is heading, both here at DU and more broadly in higher education?

Naomi Boyd:

What gives me hope is that there is a lot of noise out there, right? There’s a lot of feelings and there’s a lot of things being put out into the world that don’t necessarily have the empirical evidence to help support them. And I think that that’s where research really comes into play, is to make sure that we’re not operating on a thought or a feeling that we actually have evidence that says, yes, this is the direction that we should take. Because without it, I mean, honestly, society just breaks down. And I think that with higher ed and the value of higher ed being called into question every single day, again, I think it’s a cycle that we’re in. And I think that the betterment of society and the impetus to push the boundaries of what we know is so incredibly important, and it is at the heart of a well-functioning society.

So I have a lot of hope. I have a lot of hope for where we’re headed. I think that, again, that integration with the corporate community I think is a huge opportunity for researchers, both in the hard sciences as well as in the social sciences. And I think that we’re really going to see a deep integration of researchers and scholars working hand in hand, policymakers and with companies to create more economic growth and prosperity and make better decisions and make better decisions that are based on data. And I think that that’s really important in this time and space that we’re in.

Melissa Akaka:

I totally agree with all of that. And on the flip side of that, I would say that research builds empathy.

It forces us to study things we don’t know, and communities we don’t understand. And especially when we’re trying to build collaborations across businesses, academics, public policy makers, we have to think about multiple perspectives. And we can only solve hard problems by having hard conversations. And I think research, what gives me hope is that the research that we’re doing now, it requires us to talk across these lines. It requires us to think differently about other people, what’s happening where, and why things are changing so quickly. And because of that, one, we have evidence to support the arguments that we’re trying to make. And we have to come to the table with evidence no matter who you are in that conversation. And two, we also have to be open to other ideas and other evidence that our people are bringing from different perspectives. So I think yes, absolutely, we need evidence to have these conversations, but we also need empathy.

Joshua Ross:

I love those answers. Well, first of all, thank you for joining me on the podcast today, and thank you for making me a little bit smarter. The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in the media studio in the Daniels College of Business on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on LinkedIn, at DU Entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was edited by Katia G, produced and engineered by Patrick Orr, and hosted by Joshua Ross.