Practitioner’s Corner: Learning Toward Co-Creation
(posted on behalf of @Paul Sanchez Ruiz)
For much of my own academic training, the relationship between scholarship and practice was framed in terms of translation. Research generated insights, and practice provided a setting in which those insights might later be applied. That framing remains useful, but recent conversations within the Practitioner–Scholars Committee have prompted me to reflect on its limits.
Those conversations have increasingly centered on co-creation. By co-creation, I do not mean a formal method or a new label for engagement. I mean an approach to research in which scholars and practitioners shape questions together, early and iteratively, rather than treating practice primarily as a site for application. Co-creation shifts attention from how ideas travel into the world to how they emerge through interaction.
Some of the challenges currently shaping entrepreneurship make this shift especially salient. Developments around GenAI are a good example. AI is often discussed as a solution, or even a turning point, yet it is just as capable of creating illusions about what can be automated, predicted, or optimized. When scholarship engages these technologies at a distance from practice, it risks reinforcing confidence without understanding.
Co-creation between scholars and practitioners, in this context, requires patience. Learning from practice takes time, not because insight is slow to appear, but because meaning often emerges through use, adaptation, and constraint. Practitioners encounter AI not as an abstract capability, but through trial and error, organizational pressure, and moral imagination. Attending to these experiences allows scholars to develop frameworks that help explain human action under uncertainty, rather than offering caution that inadvertently leads to inaction.
The conversation around co-creation, and the patience it requires, also shapes how research questions are formed. When scholars arrive with fully specified theories, practice often appears only as confirmation or context. Co-creation, approached patiently, invites scholars to remain open longer, to let uncertainty persist, and to allow practice to inform inquiry itself.
For doctoral students and early-career scholars, this kind of patience can be difficult but formative. It asks them to resist the pressure to resolve questions too quickly and instead to sit with ambiguity as they learn how entrepreneurial decisions take shape over time.
The Practitioner–Scholars Committee continues to think carefully about how to create space for this kind of engagement. Our aim is not to promote co-creation as a solution, but to recognize that, particularly in periods of rapid technological change, patience in how knowledge is developed may be one of the most important scholarly resources we have.