Bridging industry and academia

My goal as a researcher is simple to state and harder to do: to help bridge the knowledge gap between industry and academia, so that each side can learn from the other. This is less a project with a start and end date than a thread that runs through everything I work on.

Where I come from

I did not go straight from university into a PhD. After a BBA at Foreign Trade University, I spent several years working:

• in social media marketing for Muong Thanh Hospitality in Vietnam,
• in digital marketing for UNIQLO in Singapore,
• in digital marketing for the Vietnam market at Telin in Taipei, while studying for an MBA at Ming Chi University of Technology,
• as a business development manager at Italisa in Bắc Giang, Vietnam.

Then, in February 2024, I started my PhD at the Digital Empowerment Lab, National Cheng Kung University.

How industry shapes my questions

Working in companies gave me a set of questions I could not answer at the time:

• Why do some digital initiatives change how a team works, while others only change the tools?
• Why does investment in digital channels and services pay off for some firms and not for others?
• How do you judge whether a business is really performing better, when performance has so many dimensions?

These are now, in a more formal shape, the questions behind my research on digital transformation, digital servitization and firm efficiency. Industry experience also helps me read research with a practical eye: I tend to ask what a result would mean for a manager on Monday morning.

How academia changes the way I look at industry

The movement goes both ways. Research has taught me to separate concepts that practice often mixes together, to be careful about what data can and cannot show, and to compare firms fairly with methods such as Data Envelopment Analysis. I wish I had had some of these tools when I was reporting campaign results every week.

Why the gap matters

Firms often make decisions about technology without the evidence that research could offer. Researchers, in turn, sometimes study questions that practitioners do not find useful, or lack access to the data and context that would make the work stronger. Neither side is to blame. They simply work on different timelines, with different incentives and different languages.

Collaboration I am open to

I am happy to hear from:

• practitioners and firms who are thinking about digital transformation or service-based business models and want to discuss research perspectives,
• researchers working on digital servitization, digital innovation, firm performance or DEA, for joint discussions or projects,
• students from Vietnam or elsewhere who are considering research in business and technology, especially if, like me, they are coming from industry.

Nothing here is a promise of results. It is an open door. If any of this is relevant to you, the contact page is the best way to reach me.

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Photos: ravishing on Pixabay, used under the Pixabay Content License. These are not my photographs.