Engaging with local communities: Five key lessons that businesses can learn from universities

Five key lessons

In the past decades, national governments and the public have increasingly held universities accountable for more than teaching and research (Sørensen et al., 2019). Governments have developed country-specific frameworks to measure and report the impact of universities beyond the academic communities of which they are an intrinsic part. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), launched in 2014, was the first exercise to assess the impact of research outside academia (REF, 2014), with “impact” defined as “the effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia” (REF, n.d.; Smith et al., 2011). As part of the REF exercise in 2014, universities in the UK submitted close to 7,000 case studies demonstrating the impact of their research on society. In India, the government has similarly devised a framework, the “Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements” (Government of India, 2018), to assess and rank the impact of Indian universities on innovation and entrepreneurship. Other nations have developed their own frameworks to evaluate the social and economic effects of their universities (Ritsilä et al., 2008). These frameworks and rankings function as templates for measuring and reporting community engagement activities, making it easier for universities to adopt or adapt such activities.

In a similar way, policy and strategy initiatives relating to carbon emissions and environmental sustainability have encouraged businesses to follow practices that commit them to and hold them accountable for sustainability goals. Various organizations, such as CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project), the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), work with businesses to develop standards for the measurement and disclosure of the impact of businesses on the environment and society. It is time for governments and industry to take a similar approach with respect to the community engagement practices of businesses. Standardized frameworks, reporting and comparisons can help businesses develop a shared understanding of community engagement, what to report and to whom, and how to compare and improve. However, research on universities (see Brennan et al., 2018; Pinheiro et al., 2012) tells us that these efforts need to be combined with organization-wide efforts to institutionalize community engagement; otherwise, engagement may remain largely symbolic and peripheral, with business-as-usual continuing at the core.

Engaged universities bring together multiple functions (e.g., teaching, research and outreach) and disciplines to create a systemic, as opposed to a piecemeal, approach to engaging with a variety of local communities. They develop activities and structures through which they can work with external stakeholders for the socio-economic and cultural development of their local communities. These endeavors also benefit universities in many ways (Benneworth, 2013). A typical example is the research center within a university that liaises with the outside world, allowing faculty members to initiate interdisciplinary research in which the local community acts as a source of academic inquiry by spurring novel research ideas, providing a basis for partnerships with local governments and organizations, or providing unique field settings for research. In the spirit of co-creation, universities often recruit local practitioners to participate in and lead critical initiatives that move beyond departmental boundaries and traditions. Moreover, such structures and activities help universities to recognize critical knowledge gaps of relevance to their local communities, in addition to generating additional income streams.

Businesses can learn from these types of endeavor and create dedicated community engagement initiatives rather than placing them within existing business units, as is often the case. Such initiatives create opportunities for business units to work together with and to learn from the local community. In the process, an internal culture of trusted collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas is nurtured across business units. For example, Cisco’s Network Academy Program deploys technology experts to prepare young people for technology careers across the world. Its Director described the impact of such cross-functional collaboration in a Cisco blog: “We’re starting to see tremendous traction with young girls and women getting excited about what ICT can offer them as a career choice” (Raymond, 2015). Cisco sees this as “social innovation.” Similarly, on its annual Impact Day, Deloitte celebrates the fact that its professionals spend the day volunteering. In 2016, 70,000 Deloitte professionals came together to volunteer and “put their experience, reach, and skills to use for the benefit of their communities” (Deloitte, n.d.). In the company’s 2019 Global Impact Report, entitled Connect for Impact, the CEO and Chair of Deloitte Global emphasize in their “Executive Message” the significance of such initiatives that connect multiple stakeholders within and across the business: “The connections we make—across businesses, disciplines, and borders, as well as with other organizations—are at the core of our success and ability to advance society” (Deloitte, 2019: 3). In short, like engaged universities, engaged businesses are finding clever ways to connect with and positively impact their local communities while pursuing new business opportunities and innovating on multiple fronts.

Universities leverage their engagement with the local communities to exploit untapped resources and generate endowments or surplus resources that can support them during a crisis (Watson et al., 2011). The Grand Challenges initiative of University College London (UCL) claims that its £1 million investment helped to raise £21 million further funding (UCL Grand Challenges, 2019). The University of Chicago recently raised $5.43 billion through a campaign titled “Inquiry and Impact” (UChicago News, 2020). The OECD’s program on the regional engagement of universities, spanning 14 regions across 12 countries, found that communities could be a source of advantage and sustainability for universities (OECD, 2007). Pinheiro et al. (2012) contend that institutionalizing such competitive advantage requires universities to integrate community engagement across the different layers of their activities—demonstrating that commitment in their mission, including their local community as a core aspect of their strategy, and aligning their values, strategies, resources and activities with those of local stakeholders. Efforts to enhance the resilience of both the local community and the university reinforce one another, producing synergies and untapped resources (“slack”) that both communities can tap into in times of uncertainty and turbulence.

Much like universities, businesses can leverage their engagement with the local community as a source of strength and resilience during times of crisis. One key development in this context, with relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic for example, is that of trusted local networks that can become the “social capital” (the fabric of a community) for businesses (Putnam, 2001). These networks not only can support struggling businesses to cope with rising adversity but are also likely to provide employees and their families with needed social support when they are confronted with tragic events: thus, they enhance the resilience of businesses and the community alike. A report on the Nordic region recommends that businesses should focus on their engagement with the local community to build trust with local actors and increase awareness of risks (Giacometti and Teräs, 2019). It suggests that such engagement can increase the solidarity of employees with local actors and their ability to self-organize during times of crisis. Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998) influential work informs us that social capital can be a unique source for organizations to create shared or new knowledge, which they can tap into for resilience during times of crisis. They argue that “organizations have some particular capabilities for creating and sharing knowledge, giving them their distinctive advantage over other institutional arrangements, such as markets” (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998: 242). Yet, like resilient universities, resilient businesses need to find an adequate balance between exploiting their current strengths and exploring new avenues and horizons that will lead to novelty, innovation and a re-imagination of future possibilities. The current focus on the co-creation of knowledge is one step in the right direction but, as with gardening, it needs constant care and nurturing for healthy growth.

However, managers need to make sure that the shared knowledge and the social capital, in the context of the local community, are reciprocal and evolve both organically and dynamically. If this is to be achieved, engagements with local communities cannot remain restricted to a few business units but must be embraced at all levels and across all functional groups, and reinforced by supportive norms, values and incentives. Businesses need to invest time and resources to identify areas that are mutually beneficial to both the community and themselves, aligning their business model to generate both shareholder and stakeholder value. At the same time, they need to ensure that impact is interpreted uniformly and is well understood by all external stakeholders. In 2011, General Electric (GE) received 4,000 entries for its “Ecomagination Challenge”—a competition in which start-ups and inventors were invited to present technologies that could accelerate the development of smart grid products and services. However, in an article for the Harvard Business Review, Andrew Winston (2014) argued that “GE should make its product offerings as environmentally sound as possible. But those initiatives should be part of business-as-usual, not necessarily fall under a banner as (supposedly) forward-looking as ecomagination.” As is the case for universities, social responsibility agendas need to move beyond marketing departments and strategic exercises to become part and parcel of “who we are” (identity) and “what we stand for” (purpose).

Many universities struggle to show the positive impact of their activities to the local community. One of the ways engaged universities have addressed this problem is by announcing “grand challenges,” making a public commitment to tackle areas of major social impact (e.g., global health, climate and migration). In the UK, UCL has given out £1 million in grants for 300 projects and 465 researchers through UCL Grand Challenges since its launch in 2009 (UCL Grand Challenges, 2019). In the USA, Inside Higher Ed—a leading online publication on higher education—reports that, over the past decade, 25 research universities belonging to the American Association of Universities and dozens of other research institutions have announced bold initiatives to address society’s grand challenges (Weiss and Khademian, 2019). The grand challenges create opportunities and provide resources to academics and departments to engage with external communities at the local, national and global levels by aligning their academic activities with such challenges. A report by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) emphasizes the significance of these challenges as “a paradigm shift for university research through which talented researchers collaborate with industry experts and government leaders towards ambitious goals, rather than waiting for policymakers and the market to adopt academic discoveries and insight” (Popowitz and Dorgelo, 2018: 2).

By publicly announcing their engagement with local communities as big bold initiatives, like the grand challenges of universities, businesses too can signal their commitment to local wellbeing, dedicate investments, measure and track progress and, most importantly, hold themselves publicly accountable. A study by Paul Chatterton and John Goddard at Newcastle University in the UK found that communicating about engagement with the local community helped in self-evaluation and drew the attention of university staff to the significance of community engagement (Chatterton and Goddard, 2000).

However, although grand challenges can be useful to those businesses whose impact on society is less explicit, they can be problematic for businesses whose profit-making motives may cloud out their impact statements. Consider Amazon. In January 2020, the company announced a $1 billion investment in India for digitizing small and medium-sized businesses so that they could sell and operate online (Govindarajan et al., 2020). As a result, thousands of small traders across India planned demonstrations against what they believed to be Amazon’s negative impact on the local retail market. So, businesses need to be careful when choosing areas of local impact as well as devising efficient and transparent ways to evaluate and monitor their societal commitments. As with universities, success is more likely to occur when there is an ongoing and honest dialogue among all stakeholders regarding crucial initiatives and their potential impacts.

Much like managers who are incentivized and rewarded for enhancing business performance, faculty members at universities are also evaluated for their research and teaching performance. Hence, to motivate faculty members to work on problems of relevance to the local community, universities and governments create targeted incentives and rewards for faculty members. These could be research grants for working on areas of significance to the community or awards to recognize work with the potential to create impact outside academic and disciplinary communities. For example, the Research Council of Norway has formulated a strategic program incentivizing universities to establish centers of applied innovation together with external partners like businesses, alongside more traditional centers of excellence programs (Research Council of Norway, 2019). The rewards and incentives urge entrepreneurial academics to find creative ways to build synergies between their core tasks of teaching and research and their community engagement efforts so that they reinforce one another.

Similarly, businesses can reward and recognize their employees for developing products and services that allow them to engage with the local community. Capgemini, an Indian IT giant, gives out Global Community Engagement Awards to celebrate the positive difference its employees create for their local communities (Capgemini, 2020). Going beyond awards and incentives, businesses can also organize training programs, nominate people to conferences, provide seed funding for novel ideas, make available one-to-one support, and build a community of locally engaged managers. These activities can motivate managers to come up with ideas and work on projects that involve the local community and contribute to its wellbeing. It is also essential for businesses to consider how they will recognize more than just the award “winners.” Many universities create a publication, or a microsite, featuring such projects, or host a showcase event in which all researchers are invited to share their engagement activities. What is more, as is the case for engaged universities, management at all levels needs to lead the way by placing the community at the center of their unit’s strategy and by supporting and rewarding engaged employees.

Concluding thoughts

While many management theories have originated from academic settings, business leaders have rarely looked inside universities for insights. However, universities have a long history of community engagement and have developed norms and policies for institutionalizing it as a core mission. At the same time, interestingly, the advent of the knowledge society has made businesses more like universities (e.g., relying on networks and knowledge) and universities more like business (e.g., a sharper focus on leadership and performance management). Therefore, the five lessons outlined in this article provide a fresh perspective about what business can learn from universities with regard to engaging with local communities and how such engagement can help business leaders deal with crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. The emphasis in these lessons is on their relevance to making businesses self-reliant, socially responsible and resilient. In short, this article establishes a parallel between university and business activities and their impact on communities.

These lessons may be particularly useful to business leaders of global organizations with operations in multiple locations. They can put the lessons into practice in designing initiatives and implementing policies and strategies for community engagement that is mutually beneficial to both their business and the community. The lessons will also be relevant for professionals working in corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability functions. Finally, those in human resources management and public relations may find the article useful with regard to enhancing employee engagement and communicating with stakeholders.