Did your company plan for this week’s trip to the World Markets’ Amusement Park?  With the environment more volatile than the craziest new roller coasters, Research needs to stay ahead of business needs and make sure that the decisions being made are based on sound knowledge. 

To help you help them, I have compiled the best tools and tactics we have found—processes and techniques that some of the best Research teams in the world use to drive quick action in their own organizations.  How do they allocate their resources to ensure the greatest impact?  It’s all about harnessing existing knowledge and communicating it in a way that makes it easy for business partners to use in their decision-making process.

With no time to initiate new projects, companies like FedEx, Sabre Holdings, Motorola, and Nokia rely on their wealth of existing knowledge to create relevant new insights:

• To make sure Research has the full information context, FedEx combines disparate data assets based on customer touchpoints, while Sabre and Texas Instruments use social media technologies to identify and collect tacit corporate knowledge.  
• To create high-quality synthesis of existing information, Motorola staffs its team with folks responsible for synthesis activities, and Nokia runs time-efficient synthesis workshops to get a cross-functional view.

But we all know that even the best knowledge foundation means nothing if business partners don’t use it. 

• A pharmaceutical company uses wiki-style sites to turn its collected wisdom into an interactive foundational knowledge platform.
• Alticor transforms product-specific research into compelling answers for broad, strategic concerns by focusing communications on pre-identified core business drivers.

In addition to these resources, we will be sharing our new work on injecting insight into your partners’ natural learning patterns over the next quarter—so stay tuned!