Abstract
Unlike fields that integrate applied knowledge, such as medicine and engineering, management education lacks a systematic framework for translating knowledge from foundational understanding into organizational implementation, industry-wide practice, and broader policy and pedagogical influence. Yet despite decades of commentary advocating design-oriented and practice-relevant scholarship, translational research has not taken hold in management, owing to five interrelated barriers that this paper identifies: institutional lock-in, epistemic divergence, the missing intellectual-property infrastructure, disciplinary heterogeneity, and the consulting paradox. Drawing on this diagnosis, we develop a framework for translational research in management that combines medicine's staged translational model with the epistemic standards of design science. This framework conceptualizes management scholarship as the systematic production of actionable knowledge that is both rigorously developed and practically tested in real-world contexts. Specifically, we tailor medicine's T0–T4 translational model to the institutional, epistemic, and structural realities of the management field and examine each stage against prominent examples. Building on this framework, we develop six actionable design propositions for business schools that specify how to build the institutional infrastructure required to foster such translational research. In doing so, the framework clarifies the roles of scholars as designers of managerial solutions and advances a systems perspective on evidence-based and practice-oriented management scholarship.