The mission of Business Horizons is to publish research that practitioners can understand to help them change their thoughts and actions. However, this mission remains an elusive ideal for many business school academics as they struggle to overcome the research-practice gap. To help scholars bridge this gap, we present social media as a boundary-spanning technology to be open to connecting with, learning from and working with academics and other stakeholders outside their field. Social media can be used as a boundary-spanning technology to help bridge the research-practice gap. To support this idea, we present a process model of five research activities--networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing--and describe how social media can make each activity more open. We present a framework of four social media-enabled open academic approaches--connector, observer, promoter, and influencer--and outline some do's and don'ts for engaging in each approach. We also discuss the potential dark side of openness through social media and offer some coping strategies. As per the mission and scope of Business Horizons, this article aims to help business academics rethink and change their practices so that our profession is more widely regarded for how our research positively impacts business practice and society in general.

Consumers often innovate with brand-related intellectual property (IP) without permission. Although firms often respond by exercising their legal right to stop such activity, there are a variety of situations in which consumers' unauthorized use of brand-related IP can be desirable for a brand or in which enforcing IP rights can adversely affect a brand. This article illustrates situations in which managers may benefit from choosing to forgo exercising their IP rights. To assist managers, this article contributes a framework for understanding the managerial approaches to situations in which consumers use IP without permission.