Emma Gardner and Amir Qamar held an event titled ‘Relevance: Bridging the Gap between Research and Business Practice’ on the 8th November at the Library of Birmingham as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science. The consisted of four practitioner-friendly presentations from ECRs (Amir, Emma, Doga Istanbulluoglu and Sabina Doldor), followed by a panel discussion (Simon Collinson, Pervez Ghauri, Chris Lonsdale, Mark Hall) on how academics are engaging with the local business community/policy/other stakeholders, and how this can be improved.