Leveraging Context: Re-Thinking Research Processes to Make “Contributions to Theory”

Researchers constantly face challenging new phenomena that warrant study. Although we do a remarkable job of studying these phenomena, we continue to miss a big opportunity to learn from these findings in ways that can help future work. This article calls for researchers to re-think common major research processes to abstract principles that can lead to more cumulative knowledge. Specifically, this paper suggests change related to four research activities—defining the problem, anchoring to prior research, seeking novelty, and reporting practices.