I had the pleasure of joining Isabella Brusati for the Digital Transformation subseries panel “#EUPRERAtalks: Co-Evolving Academia and Practice in the Age of Digital Transformation,” moderated by Grazia Murtarelli.
Our starting point was simple and uncomfortable:
If digital transformation is reshaping how we communicate, learn and work, why are academia and practice still operating like parallel universes?
The questions we tackled
During the panel discussion, we circled around a few core questions that reminded me of conversations I often have with students, practitioners and fellow researchers:
- How can academia and practice genuinely collaborate and co-create knowledge?
- What kind of competences do communicators need when algorithms accelerate both insight and misinformation?
Some of my answers
From my side, I kept coming back to three practical moves:
- From “light” versions to complex collaborations: from a simple guest lecture invitation to live pitches, outsourced research, internal masterclasses and co-created awards. The work we did at Bournemouth University with the Digital Communication Strategies course and the Digital Communication Strategies Awards is still highly relevant today. And do not discount local businesses. Pay more attention to them than to big corporations that already have plenty of choice.
- Invite researchers into your “thought leadership” work and borrow their critical distance, especially in recording and reporting process. This can be extended in many ways. Researchers can invite organisations in at the problem-framing stage, not only when the survey link or interview guide is ready. (We did that for the Future of PR/Comms and their Social Impact study. It took longer, but we gained cultural and practical insights we might have missed otherwise.) Organisations can, in turn, invite researchers to carry out research on their behalf or at least give them access to data or to the organisation to collect their own. Co-owned questions create co-owned results and make it easier to implement what we learn.
- Measure beyond the campaign: include social value. Never a missed chance to remind people about the What if framework.
We also touched on skills that go beyond digital transformation itself: managing disagreement, reporting data clearly and staying curious.
Why you might want to watch the recording
If you are
- a communicator trying to navigate AI, data and stakeholder expectations,
- a lecturer or researcher wondering how to keep your teaching and work relevant, or
- a student curious about where this profession is heading,
then this conversation might be a useful companion.
You can watch the full “#EUPRERAtalks: Co-Evolving Academia and Practice in the Age of Digital Transformation” session below.
And if something in the discussion resonates, especially around AI in PR, social impact, or co-designed research and training, feel free to get in touch. This is very much an ongoing project, not a finished story.