It's becoming academic

Could a need for specialism be pushing clients into the arms of academics?

Something has cropped up in a number of conversations with clients recently: the use of academics in place of consultants. It's a bit early to tell just how widespread the trend is (if it is, we'll report on it when we publish our next round of client research in 2013) but it seems worth mentioning because it's consistent with a number of other trends we've been observing for some time.

The first, and most obvious, is about clients' demand for specialism. Having closed the knowledge and capability gap between themselves and consultants in recent years (not least by hiring ex-consultants) clients tend to want to use consultants for the fewer, highly-specialised, things that they can't do themselves. It seems a perfectly natural extension of that trend for them to go one step further; cutting out consultants altogether and going to the people who are the source of many of the ideas the consulting industry trades on: the academics. But academics have always been there, so what's changed?

• Hyper-specialisation. Perhaps clients need for specialist advice has overtaken the ability of the consulting industry to deliver it to them. Having entered the consulting market at the generalist end they've made their way through to the other side and are now exiting at the specialist end, looking for ever-more precise solutions to their problems. If that were true then it would be a damning indictment of the consulting industry, suggesting that it has failed to recognise the need to move in the direction of client demand before they exit the other side and it loses them. On the other hand, hyper-specialisation, as we've written about before, is a dangeous game for consulting firms to play. And anyway, if the success of the Big Four in recent years is a useful measure then generalism is a market which is still bigger and easy to do.
• The economy. It doesn't seem unreasonable to suggest that, in these straightened times, clients' need to reduce the amount they spend on consulting services has led them to knock on the door of people who are far less adept than consultants at taking their money. After all, while the generalists have wasted no time reponding to a tough market by discounting their fees, this is something smaller, specialists usually find it harder to do. Perhaps they've got what clients need, but not at the price they need it.
• The ability of clients to implement. The idea that clients no longer simply want advice but implementation, too, is a well-established one. But it turns out that clients' views about implementation are a bit more sophisticated than many consulting firms have realised. Sometimes they want consutlants to come in and do the implementing for them but very often what they really want is consultants who can teach them how to implement things themselves. Well maybe clients have learned their lessons. And maybe, with a new-found ability to implement, they're better equipped to take advice from academics (who absolutely won't implement) and do something with it themselves.

The other trend is about flexibility. Clients increasingly want to be able to pick and choose from different consulting models: one minute they want a generalist firm, the next a specialist freelancer. The challenge for consulting firms concerns whether they can accomodate mutiple different models under one roof (and, perhaps more challengingly, under one brand). It's possible that a need for academic advice is just another manifestation of that trend: another model clients want to be able to call on.

Links between academic institutions and consulting firms have always existed but more than anything else they've been about thought leadership. Perhaps that's the last explanation for this trend if it really is a trend: that it's thought leadership that matters most to clients and that, in the absence of thought leadership which matches their expectations, clients are turning to the people for whom thought leadership a whole lot more than a part of the marketing mix.

Whatever the explanation, consulting firms might need to start re-thinking the purpose of the interface between consulting and academia.