1.Knowledge transfer: bringing into AIS developments in related areas that might otherwise escape the attention of more narrowly focused practitioners, exploiting the lower opportunity cost for academics to scan and learn about related academic fields. Even the most generous of IT firms, such as Google, allow their employees to spend only 20 of their time on whatever interests them as opposed to working on projects that are assigned to them. Even given their teaching and service obligations, academics have far more freedom to spend time on learning about what is going on outside accounting itself if they feel that it is important to do so, and they have the training and expertise to translate that outside knowledge into sometime that is accounting specific.