Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to conduct, study and target their results towards a real impact on key stakeholders. This does not exclude business and management scholars, and does not solely refer to scholars studying, researching and publishing on knowledge management. Thus the overwhelming expectation from all sections within and outside of the higher education ecosystem is to produce research with impact that goes beyond the confines of academia.

The principal objective thus for the Real Impact Editors will be to help solicit and facilitate scholars to align with studying, research and producing Real Impact Articles. They will be specifically dedicated at looking at the real impact side of any research published in Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM) but also in creating the preconditions for stimulating and encouraging such kind of researches: their action on facilitating and promoting worldwide moments of confrontation and meeting in order to match the JKM team and community with the “real world”, is going to be strategic. Real impact studies should go to the publication route because they should not remain just within the enterprises or the organizations where they had been produced and originated so far. The Real Impact Editors should also stimulate the “traditional” JKM Regional Editors to this action, in order to develop a quite more diffused “culture” of real impact in the overall organization of the JKM. They will periodically help the Editor-in-Chief in evaluating how much the JKM overall team is committed to this strategy and is not going in the wrong direction of a quite mere self-referential and pure academic research. With regards to the Real Impact Articles they will have the following features:

1. shorter and faster articles, written in a fast, contemporary, practical and not merely academic and scholarly style, easily understandable by entrepreneurs, managers and practitioners, available for submission and publication into two different formats:

a) Real Impact Research Articles (between 5,000 and 7,000 words max in length, all included; including both conceptual and empirical data; they should may not be only conceptual studies but whereas not presenting an original research with primary data, they should anyway comment available secondary data in a specific field of great interest for the real impact KM community and through a higher critical real impact comment);

b) Real Impact Viewpoint Articles (between 3,000 and 5,000 words max in length, all included; they should be overall conceptual studies strongly tied to real impact situations or introducing exclusive viewpoints of hot and emerging real impact topics, eventually accompanied by comment to secondary data and trends a specific fields of great interest for the real impact KM community);

2. can be co-authored by both scholars and practitioners/entrepreneurs/managers/scholars with relevant engagement in the real world (e.g. with engagement as member of Board of Administration, Board of Statutory Auditors, Consultants, etc.);
3. they should be tagged on both the website and on the hard copy either as Real Impact Research Articles or Real Impact Viewpoint Articles depending by their format of submission into the ScholarOne. 
4. faster double-blind developmental review (Real Impact Research Article: from submission to acceptance max 60 days; Real Impact Viewpoint Article: from submission to acceptance max 45 days); they should be assigned to the Real Impact Editors preferably;
5. publication priority: after publication they will be published as quickly as possible and assigned with priority to the first issue available;
6. publishable in every issue, managed and published like traditional articles, respecting all the COPE guidelines.