Designing Institutions for Applied Impact

Lessons from Engineering for Organizational Research

Authors: Charles E. Eesley (Stanford University, School of Engineering) · Elizabeth Gerber (Northwestern University, McCormick School of Engineering)

Citation: Eesley, C.; Gerber, E. 2025. CROSSROADS—Designing Institutions for Applied Impact: Lessons from Engineering for Organizational Research. Organization Science, 36(5), 2044–2051. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2025.21020

Keywords: Applied impact · Institutional design · Engineering for organizational research · Regulative / normative / cultural-cognitive pillars · Translational research

Why this paper

Organizational research keeps calling for more applied impact. Conferences and journal editorials urge scholars to engage practitioners, address grand challenges, and produce work that changes how organizations and institutions actually function. Yet the field's institutional structures — what gets published, what counts for tenure, what reviewers reward — continue to privilege theoretical novelty over usable, validated, replicable contributions to practice.

Engineering, by contrast, has spent more than a century building institutions that legitimize the opposite trade-off. Engineering journals routinely publish proven solutions before fully developed theory. Engineering's promotion criteria recognize patents, prototypes, and field deployments as primary scholarly contributions. Engineering's funding agencies (NSF I-Corps, DARPA, the NAE Grand Challenges) structurally couple research to use. Engineering education trains students to build before they generalize.

The paper asks: what would organizational research look like if it borrowed the institutional architecture engineering has already built? And it answers concretely, mapping engineering's mechanisms onto organizational research's three institutional pillars and proposing redesigns at each.

The argument, in plain English

We use Scott's three-pillar framework — regulative (formal rules and incentives), normative (professional standards and reviewer expectations), and cultural-cognitive (the taken-for-granted scripts about what counts as good scholarship) — to diagnose why applied impact stays scarce in organizational research even as everyone says they want more of it. At each pillar, we show what engineering has built and what organizational research could borrow.

Regulative. Engineering promotion and tenure cases explicitly count patents, prototypes, deployments, and translational grants. Engineering journals publish reverse-engineered, validated solutions on their own terms. Organizational research could create parallel publication venues for validated practice contributions, and could reshape promotion criteria so applied work isn't only legible as an afterthought to the "real" theoretical contribution.

Normative. Engineering reviewers ask "does it work, does it scale, does it withstand adversarial testing?" alongside "is it novel?". The professional norms reward demonstrated utility. Organizational research could explicitly add usability and field-tested validity to the reviewer rubric, including in flagship journals.

Cultural-cognitive. Engineering takes for granted that the work eventually has to leave the lab. Doctoral training is built around that expectation. Organizational research could redesign doctoral training so building, deploying, and partnering with practitioners are not optional add-ons but structurally embedded throughout the program — including in coursework, milestone requirements, and dissertation format.

Read the paper

Published in Organization Science 36(5), 2044–2051. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2025.21020 ↗

For a copy of the accepted manuscript or related working material, email cee@stanford.edu.

Related work

This paper sits within a longer-running line of inquiry on engineering schools as ecosystems for technology entrepreneurship and on how the institutional environment around researchers shapes what kind of work actually reaches the world:

• Hsu, D.H.; Roberts, E.B.; Eesley, C. 2007. Entrepreneurs from Technology-Based Universities. Research Policy, 36, 768–788. The canonical paper on engineering-school alumni entrepreneurship, using the MIT alumni dataset.
• Eesley, C.; Wang, Y. 2017. Social Influence in Entrepreneurial Career Choice: Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments on Entrepreneurial Mentorship. Research Policy, 46(3), 636–650. Randomized field evidence that structured peer mentorship measurably increases entrepreneurial activity among engineering students.
• Eesley, C.; Hsu, D.; Roberts, E.B. 2014. The Contingent Effects of Top Management Teams on Venture Performance. Strategic Management Journal, 35(12), 1798–1817.
• Lee, Y.S.; Eesley, C. 2021. Do University Entrepreneurship Programs Promote Entrepreneurship? Strategic Management Journal, 42(4), 833–861.

See also the Stanford E145 course (taught since 2009; Teaching), recently re-anchored on the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering, which puts the same institutional argument into undergraduate engineering practice.