The catalytic academic-community partnership: impactful marketing research through long term engagement

Impactful research can create exponential value beyond academic publication by meaningfully engaging with organisations and communities. While academic-community partnerships are widely advocated, far less is known about how they evolve into enduring sources of scholarly and societal impact. Without a process explanation, researchers have limited guidance for building partnerships capable of generating sustained value over time. Drawing on a six-year ethnography with Fishing for Success, a Canadian social enterprise, we develop the Catalytic Partnership Model, a process theory explaining how long-term partnerships may become impactful. The model demonstrates how sustained collaboration builds relational embeddedness and partnership legitimacy, creating relationship infrastructure that develops catalytic capacity and generates expanding pathways of scholarly, educational, organisational, community, policy, and public impact. By introducing relationship infrastructure as a theoretical construct and reconceptualising impact as a recursive, generative process, the study provides a framework for understanding how enduring academic-community partnerships become platforms for impactful marketing research.