Looking for greater real-world impact as a circular-economy researcher, Julian Kirchherr now works across management consultancy and academia.Credit: Jacobs Stock Photography/Getty
When I was growing up, many teenagers dreamed of becoming a chief executive, but I always wanted to be a professor. I imagined writing papers that would shape how businesses operate and how governments think. But roughly a decade later, as a 28-year-old assistant professor of business sustainability, I found myself standing for too long in the shower one day, feeling beaten down and generally out of control. I was caught in a system that demanded ever more grant applications and highly cited papers.
It was September 2017, nine months into my tenure-track position at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and I had just published an analysis of many of the ways in which the circular economy has been conceptualized1. The circular-economy model is broadly about using resources more efficiently to support sustainable development, although interpretations vary. Many praised my article as the most nuanced analysis of the concept so far. Yet, to me, it encapsulated everything I found frustrating about academia: scholars were applauding conceptual work, but I wanted to have real-world impact. There had to be a better way.
Careers advice from scientists in industry
Earlier in my career, I had worked as a management consultant at the Berlin office of a firm called McKinsey, which had helped to fund the PhD I needed for a career in academia. Despite some initial scepticism, I came to admire the company’s results-driven culture. Consultants, despite all the jokes, have to deliver impact, or they are not hired again. So, in early 2018, 14 months into my tenure-track post, I resigned and returned to McKinsey.
But my resignation from academia was only partial. I had secured research funding, which gave me the flexibility to negotiate a 10% academic role at Utrecht. And that is how my life as a ‘pracademic’ began.
A foot in both camps
A pracademic is someone with one foot in academia and the other in practice, and I stumbled across the term one day while procrastinating on LinkedIn. Although new to me then, the term has been around for at least 25 years.
When I rejoined McKinsey, I started in a relatively junior role. At first, I kept my academic work mostly quiet. Consulting has an all-in culture, and I worried that a side gig might raise doubts about my commitment. Only in late 2022, after being elected a partner who holds equity in the firm, did I begin to speak openly about my dual path.
That shift helped to unlock synergies between my roles. Some ideas I explored at the university started to shape my consulting work — and vice versa. However, it did not start out this way. Originally, I had imagined carving out Fridays for research, hoping that insights from those days would inform my consulting work in the week that followed. But that plan quickly unravelled. Consulting is unpredictable, and Fridays rarely stayed free for research.
And few clients were interested in my circular-economy work, so I developed expertise in a very different area. One of my first projects after returning to McKinsey involved helping a government to rethink how to attract and retain talent in the public sector — including how to design career paths. Unsurprisingly, I advocated greater flexibility. These topics stuck with me, and today I mostly specialize in what McKinsey calls ‘people and organizational performance’.
Building a circular economy
Although most of my consulting work has little to do with my academic research, I value being a pracademic. Above all, I appreciate the freedom to follow ideas that genuinely interest me — and I feel most alive as a scholar when writing about them. Some of my work is highly applied. For example, I have collaborated with the European Commission on making the hydrogen ‘value chain’ more circular2, which is integral for Europe’s decarbonization goals. The value chain covers everything involved in hydrogen production, including the equipment used along the way. The project explored measures such as setting recycling targets for rare metals — including iridium, which is essential for hydrogen production.
Living in two professional worlds also sparks fresh ideas for my research. At McKinsey, I frequently help organizations to develop skill taxonomies — frameworks that define the essential workplace competencies that employees need to perform effectively in their roles. That work inspired a research paper on skill taxonomies for businesses transitioning to a circular economy3. Several companies now use it to shape job ads and training programmes.
Taking a prod at ‘productivity’
Being a pracademic has also allowed me to be more controversial. My most-read paper — titled Bullshit in the Sustainability and Transitions Literature: A Provocation4 — mocks the tendency of many scholars to chase citations over genuine insight. Numerous academics praised it, but some found it too harsh. Had I stayed on the conventional academic path, I might have been too wary of that criticism to write the article at all.
Perhaps because of this freedom, I’ve also had academic success: my Google Scholar profile is approaching 20,000 citations, and Stanford University’s database ranks me in the top 1% of scientists globally in terms of citation impact. More meaningfully, my research has been featured in more than 200 policy reports by institutions including the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
I maintain that my academic work offers a strong return on investment for any university that keeps me on the payroll. At McKinsey, the value might be less obvious at times, given my content focus, although from time to time I develop consulting work that’s rooted in my research. For instance, some months ago, I proposed to the governing body of a large city a project to transform it into a ‘circular city’ — an idea that those involved have now agreed to pursue. The work will focus on reducing the use of resources and improving reuse and recycling, drawing on insights from a research project that I continue to lead.
