IN THIS ISSUE

For quite some time, business school academics have been challenged by the double hurdle of scholarly quality and practice relevance. Since its origin, the Decision Sciences journal has placed considerable importance on managerial relevance and the advancement of effective decision-making practices in privateand publicsector organizations. Nearly 3 years ago, Decision Sciences refocused its editorial mission to place greater emphasis on managerial relevance and interdisciplinary research. While the journal has made reasonable progress toward increasing managerial relevance, there is still much work to be done. After two decades of pursuing empirical-based and industry-driven research, many decision sciences scholars continue to raise concerns that our research lacks relevance to practice—both for practicing managers and for educating future managers in the business school classroom. For senior academics, this message is not an entirely new one. So, what is different today? After a considerable push to promote the double hurdles of managerial relevance and scholarly quality, the majority of current decision sciences research still tends to strongly favor scholarly quality over practice relevance. Review panels are keenly aware of the importance of practice relevance and do a noble job of identifying papers with little or no practice relevance. However, it is my observation that reviewers truly struggle when they are challenged by making trade-offs between rigor and relevance. That said, there are an increasing number of decision sciences scholars who have successfully demonstrated that both hurdles can be jumped even when their heights are reasonably high. This encouraging trend must occur with a higher degree of frequency and involve significantly larger numbers of decision sciences scholars. Over the next year, Decision Sciences will publish a number of practice relevance commentaries. Beyond having a spirited discussion of the appropriate heights of the double hurdles, these commentaries will center on specific means for jumping a higher practice relevance hurdle as well as strategies for disseminating our research into the practice community. As I thought about the inaugural commentary, I decided to approach highly visible scholars with a demonstrated track record of engaging industry in research partnerships. Almost immediately, closed-loop supply chains came to mind as the seeds for this area were planted by the academic–industry research partnership lead of Professors Guide and Van Wassenhove. It is my hope that you find their article, “Dancing with the Devil: Partnering with Industry, but Publishing in Academia,” to be inspirational and also of practical value to you in integrating industry into your research endeavors.