Academic Research: Get the Word Out

After moderating a financial inclusion session during IPA’s recent Impact and Policy Conference in Bangkok, I felt upbeat about the relevance of academic research for the private sector.  But it took me a while to get there.  

You see, I’m a regular on the conference circuit.  But the gatherings I’m familiar with operate in a different world.  Dominated by private sector business types, these events are identifiable by conveniently predictable, if often vacuous, buzzwords; everyone’s got an out-of-the-box paradigm buster to share.   

What a fish out of water in Bangkok!  Instead of slick PowerPoints pitching the next “game-changing business model,” the talk here was all about evidence from interventions; structural constraints versus behavioral constraints; and whether randomized control trials, or RCTs, can be done faster, cheaper.  This was the world of academic research – and I liked it.  Because these people were smart.  And I (a “practitioner,” I quickly learned to call myself) was invited to hear about their latest and greatest research.  This was good stuff.

In the financial inclusion world today, there is some healthy debate about the role of research, including the pros and cons of different approaches.   In the CGAP blogosphere alone, there’s a recognition that large-scale quantitative databases such as the World Bank Findex can encourage product and service providers to lean on an empirical fact base as they size up their target markets, rather than gut feeling.  Others have talked about the value of applied research methodologies or, more generally, the merits of complementing quantitative research with qualitative.

So what of the role for heavy-duty academic research?  This, it would seem, is the serious stuff: randomized control trials, for instance, with clearly delineated control groups, rigorous statistical analysis, and the scrutiny of peer review. 

Judging from my day at the conference, there’s a ton of great material out there (not all of it RCTs, or even quant, no doubt).  It could be of real relevance to existing and would-be providers, so long as they knew about it!  So, my first thought on how this academic research might have greater impact is this: get the word out.

As Ignacio Mas points out, the issue may be less that we need more research and more that someone needs to do something with what’s already out there.  IPA has a great searchable database of publications they’re involved in – but how many existing and prospective demand-side providers have the URL bookmarked?   If the task at hand is to get the people who offer financial services to step up their innovation game in end-user product design (reasons for optimism here; the nature of the challenge here), we need to share the treasure trove of existing academic research far and wide.

Second, let’s look at more opportunities like IPA’s matchmaking exercise, which aims to get the right researchers paired with the right providers.  There’s no better way to produce good research than to have both parties sign off on the brief together – and this could get academic research into new and important areas, too.  (Easy example: as a network business, Visa would have a great deal of interest in research that looks into one of the hot topics of the day for branchless banking – interoperability). 

While in Bangkok for that one day, I picked up a useful nugget about the motivations behind emergency funds transfers during times of crisis in Rwanda (interesting to me because I spend a lot of time there, but maybe interesting to others, too – here it is.)  I never would have picked that up if IPA, together with ADB and J-PAL, hadn’t brought different worlds together in this conference: researchers, policy makers, and practitioners – where practitioners even included the likes of a multinational payment network.  We need to do more of this, and we need to get both past and future bodies of academic research out farther and wider. 

----- The author is the head of Emerging Market Solutions at Visa