Research at EHL operates through three different modes, but its real strength comes from the circulation of knowledge between academia, industry and the classroom.
Research can sometimes appear far removed from the world it is ultimately meant to serve. Academic research is necessarily rigorous and complex, while industry is often dealing with immediate questions: How do we respond to technological change? How do we improve an experience? How do we make a business more resilient? How do we address a problem for which there is not yet an obvious solution?
At EHL, I believe these should not be separate conversations. One of our greatest strengths as a hospitality business school is our proximity to industry. It gives us the opportunity to contribute to knowledge while remaining closely connected to the people and communities to which that knowledge ultimately matters.
EHL’s Three Forms of Research
At EHL, our research broadly wears three hats: fundamental, applied and practice based. These distinctions matter because the three types of research do not necessarily begin with the same questions or produce the same outcomes. I do not see them as a hierarchy; each has its own purpose and value. More importantly, they can inform and strengthen one another.
1. Fundamental Research: Expanding What We Know
Fundamental research has one final objective: the advancement of knowledge itself. Rather than addressing an immediate business need, we investigate questions rigorously and systematically to better understand a phenomenon and contribute new knowledge to our field. Its practical value may not always be immediately visible, but it creates the foundations upon which future applications and innovations can be built.
At EHL, we pursue this type of research through projects supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Switzerland’s leading research-funding organization and an important supporter of fundamental research. One example is the work of Dr. Nicole Hinrichs and Dr. Marc Stierand on the professional identity development of Michelin-starred chefs. This research examines how successful creative professionals develop their identities over time, in particular, how they negotiate the tension between belonging to an established, prestigious system and preserving the individuality and creativity needed to stand out. By exploring how professionals shape, reshape or even let go of aspects of their identities throughout their careers, the project contributes to our broader understanding of professional development in creative fields.
This work therefore illustrates an important characteristic of fundamental research: its starting point is the advancement of knowledge, but the knowledge it generates may ultimately shape how we understand and approach challenges in practice.
2. Applied Research: Addressing Challenges That Matter
Applied research brings us closer to a concrete challenge. Here, we use rigorous research methodologies with a practical objective in mind, often working with organizations outside academia.
Our work with Innosuisse and Innotour offers good examples. Recently I have been involved in projects including the Innosuisse-funded Resilient Tourism: The Power of Data for Swiss Tourism Competitiveness Flagship and Innotour-supported project exploring the future of Smart Destinations Technology.
The Resilient Tourism Flagship is particularly significant for me because it demonstrates what becomes possible when we create an ecosystem around a major industry challenge. It connected different projects, Swiss research institutions and industry partners, with EHL contributing to coordination and cross-fertilization across the initiative.
EHL was the proud coordinator of the whole project which lasted 5 years with six academic partners and more than 34 partners from the industry, all tackling the same issue: how travel data space and the advent of AI is driving change in the wider travel and tourism field.
This tells us something important about applied research: it cannot simply be about academics having an answer and passing it to industry. Researchers bring evidence, scientific methods and new perspectives, with industry bringing operational knowledge, experience and real-world challenges. When these perspectives meet, we can co-create new solutions and new ways of understanding a problem. In these types of projects, research seeks to advance academic knowledge while contributing meaningfully to practice, with research papers forming part of this dual contribution.
3. Practice-Based Research: Starting with the Need
Practice-based research takes that proximity further still. Here, we begin with a concrete need identified by an organization, business or destination and work alongside practitioners to co-create a response. The outcome might be a new process, service, methodology or product, or simply a different way of approaching a persistent challenge.
One example is the work of the EHL Innovation Hub with Trentino Marketing on Le Belle Stagioni in the Trentino Mountain Region in Northern Italy. Trentino already has strong tourism assets, but the challenge is to maintain a reliable and coherent visitor experience during the shoulder seasons, the quieter periods between the main winter and summer peaks.
This involves interconnected issues such as service continuity, opening periods, mobility, workforce retention and coordination across the destination ecosystem. Rather than approaching these issues from the outside, the project brings together stakeholders including hotel and ski resort managers, travel agencies and local tourism organizations through facilitated co-design workshops. Participants identify gaps and opportunities, develop a shared diagnosis and vision, and move from idea generation to prioritization, with the results synthesized into a practical roadmap.
The academic contribution here is therefore directed towards practice: research and knowledge provide a structured basis for stakeholders to develop solutions that are tailored to the realities of the destination. This collaborative dimension helps move us beyond the traditional image of the university as an ivory tower. Knowledge does not sit on one side and practice on the other. Researchers and practitioners bring different forms of expertise to the table, and new knowledge emerges through the process of working together.
The Research Ecosystem
In truth, the boundaries between these three categories are fluid, and this is precisely where some of the greatest opportunities lie. Fundamental research may lead to practical applications; an industry problem may expose a question requiring deeper investigation; and applied research may generate entirely new research questions.
We can see this movement across many areas of research at EHL. Dr. Maggie Chen’s work on hospitality vibes, for example, draws on research and insights from across the social sciences to explore how human connection and positive relational energy can help hospitality respond to challenges ranging from digitalization and talent shortages to social disconnection. This work culminated in her book Hospitality Vibes, which translates these ideas into a practical framework for rethinking and guiding hospitality practices, placing meaningful human interaction at the heart of the experience. In this sense, academic knowledge becomes not simply something to disseminate, but something that can shape how an industry thinks and acts.
We see a different expression of the same dynamic in Philippe Masset’s work around wine. His involvement in the Vine to Mind initiative brings together wine research and practice with data science and AI, creating a forum where academics and industry experts can examine questions such as responsible production and consumption, changing consumer behavior and the role of technology in the future of wine. This project connects EHL with the Harvard Data Science Initiative and Harvard Data Science Review, illustrating how research can travel across disciplines and institutional boundaries.
These examples capture the type of research ecosystem we should encourage. Knowledge leads to application, application allows experimentation, and experimentation generates new knowledge. So perhaps the most interesting question is not simply, What kind of research are we doing? Rather: Where will that knowledge travel next?
Research Needs to Travel into the Classroom
One of its most important destinations is our classroom. I do not believe that research should finish when an academic article is published or when an industry project reaches its conclusion. In a business school, some of its most meaningful impact can happen when that knowledge enters the student learning experience. A research finding can become a case study. An industry problem can become a classroom discussion. A methodology developed through research can become a tool students learn to use.
The exchange also travels in the opposite direction. Students question assumptions and bring perspectives that can make us look differently at what we are investigating. This connection between my research and my teaching has always been important to me. My research increasingly explores human-centered digital transformation alongside topics such as experience design and regenerative hospitality, while my teaching at EHL spans areas including Digital and AI Marketing, Experience Design and International Services Marketing and Regeneration.
This creates a very natural bridge between the two. Questions emerging from research around AI and digital transformation can be brought into the classroom, where students are asked to consider technology not simply in terms of what it can do, but in terms of the experiences it creates and the people it affects. In turn, working with students on real organizational challenges provides another space in which these ideas can be questioned, tested and developed. EHL’s Human-Centered Digitalization specialization reflects this approach explicitly, combining emerging technologies, data and AI with an experience-driven perspective and real-world application.
I do not see research and teaching as parallel activities. They should constantly enrich one another. Today's research question can become tomorrow's classroom discussion and, eventually, a challenge our graduates are better equipped to tackle in their careers.
Making Research Understandable is Part of Making it Useful
Knowledge cannot travel if people cannot understand it. Academic rigor is non-negotiable, but so is our responsibility to make research accessible beyond specialist communities. What in French we might call vulgarisation does not mean simplifying the research itself; it means translating complexity without losing its integrity, so that industry professionals, policymakers and students can understand why our findings matter.
This requires thinking carefully about the forms research takes once it leaves the academic journal. A study might become a teaching case, industry report, workshop, conference discussion, podcast or practitioner article. The format changes, but the rigor behind the knowledge does not. Publishing research disseminates knowledge; making it understandable allows that knowledge to travel and be used.
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