4. Effective Business Research
by Marvin Cheung, Head of Research and Strategy
About the Next Series
We advise a wide range of clients at the Venture Strategy Group from first time entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 Executives. As part of Unbuilt Labs’ Think Tank Ecosystem, we specialize in translating academic and technical research into business insights. We take a research-driven approach in the Next Series to demonstrate the enduring principles behind best practices and identify new ways to think about business challenges. Feel free to sign up for an advising session if you want to explore a topic further.
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An Introduction to Effective Business Research
Research has a fairly straightforward definition: the systematic study of a subject. Business research can mean several things: research on, for, or within a business. For the purpose of this essay, we want to focus on the latter two cases. In particular, we want to ask: how can decision-makers within a company identify and conduct good research; and how do we find answers in a world that is constantly changing?
Research conducted for and within a business has several defining characteristics. First, we do not conduct research for research’s sake. We need research to deliver results. Second, businesses have limited resources. We need to conduct research efficiently. Third, an overseer outside of or within an organization needs to approve the project and acknowledge the validity of the recommendations.
We also need to recognize the reality of conducting research in business environments. Unless your role is in R&D, a three-month research project would already be considered very generous. An agile sprint only lasts two weeks. In the face of a crisis where information needs to flow to executives in real time, a business decision needs to be made in one to three days.
Business research textbooks advocate for the highest standards of research, which is admirable, but is often not effective or even possible for executives. We do not have the resources, expertise, or need to boil the ocean and launch a multiyear study for every business decision - this would be ineffective. We cannot use conclusive data gathered and analyzed one or two years after the event to make business decisions either - this would be impossible.
In order for us to conduct research for and within a business, we need to be pragmatic, and instead answer questions to the best of our knowledge within resource constraints. Paradoxically, effective business research requires us to be comfortable with not knowing. This should not be a foreign concept. In the previous Coursebook, Managing Complexity, we discussed the idea of complexity: there are subjects that lie beyond the boundaries of human knowledge and confounds even the most sophisticated minds and technologies.
In the essay “Innovating systematically in complex conditions through guided trial and error”, we looked at how we can think about innovating, and the process can apply to research as well: faced with limited time and resources, how do you derive new and actionable insights? In the essay “basic research standards for evidence-based decision-making in business environments”, we established the minimum research standards executives should adhere to.
We always recommend following the basic research standards we have established. In this Coursebook, we will explore in further detail where these best practices come from, give you an idea of how a theory is legitimized, and help you anticipate challenges when you put forward your research. We want you to be able to design a research project well and secure the necessary sign-offs without delay.
In the process of addressing how to conduct effective business research, we will also discuss questions such as: Given strict standards and resource constraints, what do we have control over? Ultimately, we will lay out pragmatism, the research philosophy, as a foundation for multidisciplinary and mixed-method research. Executives today deal with a vast array of sources and topics in order to make decisions - by offering a thorough treatment of the topic, we will begin to open avenues to connect business decision-making with rigorous academic research.
Coming soon
The epistemological implications of pragmatism on theory building and theory testing in high risk, high uncertainty business environments
A guide to mixed method research