Have your cake and eat it too: Achieving scientific legitimacy

Abstract

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. LaPlaca alone and with colleagues has contributed > 100 insightful studies focusing in advancing science in industrial marketing management (IMM).His body of work constitutes a remarkable scholarly legacy in identifying the milestones in advances in the pursuit of scientific contributions in IMM and in informing scholars of what the field must tackle successfully to achieve scientific legitimacy-that is, engagement in a true paradigm shift, one that advances discovery in this area from sheer descriptive analysis and reporting to the development of explanatory schemata and theoretical frameworks of a kind that allow for accurate prediction of underlying B2B phenomena.The present article is a tribute offering to LaPlaca for this central insight and LaPlaca's body of work generally.The essay here identifies research advances in theory and analytics that contribute successfully to the primary need LaPlaca and colleagues identify for IMM to achieve scientific legitimacy.An explosion in case-based predictive model-building occurred in the teen years of the 21st century that responds to the challenge of achieving accurate prediction of B2B phenomena.A few scholars became renowned through their scholarly contributions, LaPlaca is one of these few because of his mapping of IMM paradigm shifts taking the field closer to the overarching objective of scientific legitimacy.