Wharton tops FT ranking of business schools with impact

US business schools led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton produce the most influential academic research for decision makers in business and government, according to an FT ranking and analysis.

Nearly half of the 50 top-ranked global institutions with faculty publishing research that is widely read or cited by non-academics are based in the US, reflecting their substantial resources and dominance of publications in the English language.

Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago: Booth rank close behind Wharton in the FT Research Insights ranking (below), with Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, scoring highest in Europe, in 14th place, immediately followed by Hong Kong University Business School and the University of Oxford: Saïd.

Erika James, dean of the Wharton School, stressed the importance of relevance: “Business schools have to be in the service of business. Research has to have academic integrity and be relevant to the real world issues that industry is looking to solve.”

The FT assessment examines high quality peer-reviewed research published in the past five years that is widely cited in other leading academic journals, referenced in government and think-tank documents, downloaded by people outside universities or mentioned online and on social media. (Article continues after ranking.)

The ranking also scores highly those business schools with authors who produce research that aligns closely with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as a proxy for relevance to societal needs, and who write widely used teaching cases providing insights to students and executives.

The analysis comes at a time of growing concern that much business school research is overly theoretical and of limited outside use. “I would not say that the majority of research is focused on issues of relevance for today’s world,” said Prof Andrew Hoffman of Michigan Ross business school.

The AACSB, the US-based accreditation agency, last month launched a draft Global Research Impact report with nine scholarly societies, designed to broaden “the way business school research impact is defined, measured, and advanced” beyond traditional citation metrics.

Wharton’s academics score highest overall, as well as for positive citations in other papers, SDG-related content, downloads and social media references. Polimi Graduate School of Management in Milan ranks second for SDG content, followed by MIT: Sloan.

Harvard Business School, followed by Western University: Ivey in Canada and the University of Virginia: Darden, rank top for widely used teaching case studies.

University of Chicago: Booth, Harvard Business School and the University of California Berkeley: Haas rank top for policy citations, tracked by the consultancy Overton. Tias Business School, at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Cornell University: Johnson and Yale School of Management rank top for productivity, measuring the extent of high impact research normalised for faculty size.

David Willetts, a former English universities and science minister and president of the Resolution Foundation think-tank, called for business schools to focus more on local needs. “Our business schools are not playing the role in the local or national economy that they should,” he said. “The leading economic and business journals are not particularly focused on Britain and its problems.”

Prof Tima Bansal at Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada called for more applied research. “We build elegant models that explain business-related performance, rather than creating tools that shape it,” she argued.

However, Prof Yehuda Baruch at the University of Southampton Business School and Prof Pawan Budhwar at Aston Business School argued that requiring impact could violate academic freedom and was difficult to measure. “Academics would do better by focusing their energies on rigorous academic research, while leaving others to take the lead role in developing practice,” they said.