As Management Academics Can / Should we IGNORE the gaping cleft between Industry and Academia?

Yes, there is a gap, and the reason, I believe, lies in the way we work at both ends. I work in the field of advertising and recently met a few experts to gain insights on a concept that I am working on presently. During my talks with them, I could categorize them into three types, in terms their orientation to academics.
* While some of them are aware of what's going on in the academic end of the field, they are wary of applying our recommendations because they can't think of how to operationalize them.

* The 2nd group was unaware of what happened in academia. Believe me these were celebrated creative heads in big advertising companies, and they knew what they were doing. When I pressed on "how do you know what to do and what not to do?", the almost unanimous reply was, "we have a 'gut-feel' that is pruned by years of experience".

* Finally, the 3rd kind was experts who thought that we hunted down research problems since we didn't have anything better to do. As much as I disliked this, I couldn't ignore them completely when I looked at how consistently successful they were, w/o our help, and when they pointed out how theoretically fine but operationally inapplicable quite a bit of our work was.

Solution? During the 70's, Prof. Little set the example of working on a problem and stripping it down to the level where it becomes, well manager-oriented, if we may call it that. Sharing the views expressed by some friends, Mr. Denis and Prof. Erera, "Dumbing down the report or presentation is NOT the answer". While we select a problem for research, we must screen it through the relevance filter, permitting proposals that would be of worth to practitioners in the field. Of course we can work on hypothetical ideal situations, which can serve as the reference levels for ensuing normative work. However, we shouldn't forget to add the bit where we elucidate on the "How to apply it to problems stacked up on the managers' desk".