The Problem The gap between research and practice has been recognized and analyzed across multiple fields. Various solutions have been proposed but the gap persists. Although there are consistent calls for joint actions through collaborations between scholars and practitioners, not many in either party have taken it as their primary responsibilities. Thus, incremental or suboptimal efforts have been made to bridge the great divide. The Solution In this article, we propose forming a new entity—intermediary—as an effective approach to transforming research into practice. Also, we share a real-world case to illustrate how this approach and its outcome can contribute to closing the research-practice divide. The Stakeholders Three stakeholders will benefit from this research—scholars, practitioners, and intermediaries. Both scholars and practitioners will better understand the transformation process and various ways to close research-practice divide. Intermediaries will have a better knowledge about how their contributions, skills and motivations are different from other two stakeholders.

on a wide array of supply-chain management topics, including customer stratification, pricing optimization, distributor profitability, sales and marketing, growth and business development, inventory management, warehouse management/layout design, and global business decisions. He works with distributors from small and medium enterprises to large, global corporations. He has more than 10 years of industry experience, managing more than 90 projects. Pradip holds a Masters Degree in industrial engineering from Texas A&M University and a Bachelors in mechanical engineering from P.S.G. College of Technology, Bharathiar University, India. He has written 6 books on quantifying the value of distribution, profitability, and best practices. Manufacturing organizations in the twenty first century are much more distributed than those of nineteenth century where companies used to be mostly vertically integrated. This has made the manufacturing planning works increasingly complex. On top of that, globalization and advances in information technology have added yet another layer of complexity to manufacturing and supply chain management. In this paper, we present results of an exploratory study of manufacturing engineering technology curricula of key select 4-year and 2-year colleges in the US. More specifically, this paper focuses on the institutes of those States that are among the highly ranked states with respect to manufacturing outputs in the U.S. The paper presents the results of two types of survey. First, through website exploration, it examines the curricula of the community colleges and 4-year institutes that offer manufacturing technology programs to determine if they offer any course on supply chain management and information technology systems. Secondly, the paper reviews the prior educational publications to identify the gap in existing manufacturing curricula. The main objective of this study is to create awareness in the manufacturing educators community thereby determine if there is a gap in the curricula that needs to be addressed.

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