This week I present the last of a series of posts sharing results from surveys on our Primary Research Forum.  (check out past posts on communication trends, data collection trends, and scattered research teams)

Our members weighed in on their biggest priorities as they work to become more of a strategic partner in their organization, and the response rate shows that this goal resonates well with researchers, but the action plan for how to get there isn’t as consistent:

Taking a look at the three most popular priorities:

1. Getting business partners more engaged in the insight generation process—as with most business initiatives, getting stakeholders involved early does improve the uptake of results, and we’ve seen some research departments gain a lot from looping their partners involved in the process.  In one example, Eli Lilly trains its line partners on insight generation to help them create, understand, and apply insights to achieve growth.
2. Ensuring that research is focused on projects that matter—the ever-popular Issue Sensing and Agenda Planning: we have an entire topic center on our Web site devoted to it!  And the key here is to not only diagnose their issues properly, but to also have some proactive issue sensing in place to make sure you’re addressing the needs that business partners don’t even know that they have.
3. Understanding the drivers of business impact—knowing what your partners are looking for to create impact means that you yourself will create impact.  We’ve worked with line partners to understand, in general, Research’s highest value activities, but you also have to examine your individual organization to identify specific business drivers.  We’ve seen this work at Amway, which identified core business drivers and now transforms product-specific research into compelling answers for strategic concerns.

So, what do you think?  Did we miss any priorities that will help Research functions become more strategic?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.