Research Methods for Modern Business Environment

There’s a revolution going on today, much like several that have preceded the current one. A few hundred years ago, the introduction of double entry bookkeeping played a key role in allowing business enterprises to not just start opening numerous, geographically separate branches, but also start to employ more people without having to insist on impeccable credentials. This meant that businesses were no longer restricted to a size that could be staffed primarily by family members. Around a hundred years ago, typewriters became feasible, along with modern corporations. Suddenly, it became possible to produce highly legible reports, in duplicate, in a fraction of the time it would take to write them out in longhand. Given that the typical modern high-level executive reads almost twice as fast as the average adult, the historical importance of the typewriter is much greater than most people realize.

Even before that, merchants, speculators and shippers realized that having to wait almost two weeks for a message to make a round trip across the Atlantic wasn’t optimal. The perceived scale of the problem can be illustrated by the fact that around 17,500 kilometers of undersea communication cable had been laid by that time, over much shorter distances, of which less than a third actually worked. The investors in the first attempt at a trans-Atlantic telegraph line decided to go ahead anyway, balancing the probability of technical failure against a huge potential payoff.

All of these caused changes in what was commercially feasible that were nothing short of spectacular, and all of them involved the generation, transmission and interpretation of information. Today, we are seeing the large-scale implementation of technologies such as data mining, rapid A/B testing and location analytics, but what does this mean in practical terms? Are these only for use by enormous enterprises, or can smaller businesses benefit from them too?

Business research can be separated into two overlapping areas: basic research, in which academics study the nature of business from a wider perspective, and practical research, which enables managers to make the best possible decision. Both use the same methods in general, but their application may differ considerably, with comprehensiveness, accuracy and a historical context being more important in basic research while managerial applications will generally be more concerned with the time value of information – it may better to make a good decision today than a thoroughly informed one once it’s too late to be useful. The emphasis will therefore be on gathering enough information efficiently to give a good general view, rather than as much data as possible. The methodology of business research encompasses numerous fields. It will be difficult to design an effective questionnaire without some basic knowledge of psychology, understanding how businesses function is of course key, while statistics play a role throughout. Even public speaking and writing skills are important, since nobody will want to read even a perfect report if it’s badly formatted.

This book will strive to address all of these aspects from a functional perspective, giving the reader a foundation sufficient to design his or her own research studies, carry them out effectively and economically, and finally interpret the results of both his own studies and the work of others effectively.

Dr Surbhi Jain is the head of Academics at Regenesys Institute of Management. She has a PhD (management) and an MBA (Marketing and HR). She has over 10 years of experience. She reads voraciously and writes eclectically. She has published a book on Business communication and that is now a prescribed textbook for Mumbai university management course. She is currently authoring a book on Change management. This is in addition to 4 international research papers and 3 international case studies that she has published within the last 4 years. She has supervised 137 MBA students over the last 10 years for their research dissertations and 6 students are writing their doctoral thesis under her guidance. She believes in encouraging young individuals to see the beauty and potential that is within them and encouraging deep love and respect for others and the environment.