Let me give you a small glimpse into corporate reality, where I’m free. We discussed the challenges of conveying research results to corporate people. They’re very busy people and the distance is enormous. Rohan then asked me to suggest how to target these decision makers in the corporate setting with relevant evidence. This is something I’ve been struggling with for 18-20 years. I’ll try to be as frank as possible without getting fired.
My question is, does evidence get used within companies? What type of evidence is considered evidence? How are decisions regarding strategy really made? I’m from Telenor, and next year almost 1/3rd of our revenue will be coming from Asia, so understanding is very important to us.
I’ll cut right to the chase here. What suggestions do I have, based primarily as a researcher within a mobile network operator?
1. You need to know what counts as evidence and what acts as input
Decisions are often based on gut feelings, stereotypes of our customers, especially people at the bottom of the pyramid. However, decisions are based on market intelligence or business intelligence. In addition we have call data records. Every call is registered and 20 or 30 parameters is registered on the mainframe computers. This data, however, seldom includes data on social networks. It’s the individual, average revenue per user, etc. What’s missing is the network, the social networking, who do people communicate with. I think this will be a future research area.
Unfortunately a lot of research is not contextual. It focuses on the individual. Recently we are focusing on sending people out to the village level, but that’s relatively new.
2. LIRNEasia should be aware that you have competitors. You need to be aware of who the current sources of market intelligence are.
They’re very flashy and they communicate in a lingo that decision makers understand. It’s all been packaged very neatly to meet the needs of corporates, in non-academic language.
3. You need to understand the mindset and priorities of decision makers.
4. Speak the tongue of the corporates. Preach the gospel in a way they’ll understand it
5. Senior managers, even those recruited locally, are rarely exposed to people at the bottom of the pyramid. They also have limited willingness to go out there.
6. Focus on attention-getters. You need to tell them something they don’t know.
LIRNEasia should challenge their assumptions, but be prepared to back it up with solid empirical data
7. Be where they are.
They’re not going to come to you. What do they read? Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal. Be there.
8. Numbers and facts do not speak for themselves.
You have to give them some guidelines on how to interpret their findings. You have to give them some basic instructions on how to interpret research.
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