I met some managers and business owners that don’t aspire to academic career but want to write their PhD dissertations to: (1) present their new knowledge (“the anecdotal evidence”, the scholars would say) about what the current business problems are (2) supply the new knowledge to academia.
I suggest them to use the case study research (R.Yin) as the method of their dissertations.
Have you (as PhD supervisors, reviewers or PhD students) any experience (successes, failures, problems) related to case-study-research-PhD-dissertations at your universities? Do they happen at your universities? Successfully? Any crashes with “hypotheses testing” culture at the universities? What are their contributions to the academic knowledge?