Research how to: A practical guide

Research is a challenging task and requires a substantial effort and resource including both time and monetary.

However, we must (or most of us already) believe that research is a value-creation activity instead of a cost-centre activity.

This post is a brief review of a book “Research how to: A practical guide”.

This book provides a humble effort on utilising various proven principles from various disciplines, such as management, marketing and finance, to improve our research activities.

This book tries to help readers on how to improve their research activities and to bring their research to the next level.

The following is the intro of the nine chapters of the book. The book will give details execution of all the “how to” presented in these chapters.

Do you want to have good research philosophies and improve your research management and productivity?

This book is a humble effort to map well-known and proven principles and rules from various disciplines, such as management, organization decision theory, leadership, strategy, finance and marketing, into a single practical research guide that applies to all disciplines.

You can also get this book from Rakuten Kobo.

CHAPTER 1: How to determine the main research tools?

We need tools for performing research. The question is what the main tools we need to help us accomplishing our research tasks are.

We can argue various different main tools depending on our disciplines.

For example, if we are a mechanical engineer we may say that the fundamental tool is a computer-aided design (CAD), or if we are a computer scientist we may say that the important tools are assembly and C/C++ language, and if we are a chemist, we may say that the essential research tool is Pyrex glassware.

However, the main tools for any research are no other than writing and reading skills. Yes, writing and reading.

We seem to have all of these two skills, but in reality, many of us do not realise that we are not good enough on these two skills.

In the book, we will discuss how these two skills are important.

Especially, for writing, the book provides many examples of writing mistakes which we think they are small, but the mistakes substantially deteriorate the writing to a level that our paper maybe rejected due to some misunderstanding by readers.

Explaining figures in a report or paper are essential to clarify our findings and the book also gives examples on how to explain them in the text of our articles.

In addition, practical tips and tricks on writing, which can substantially improve our reports or articles, are presented in the book.

CHAPTER 2: How to select research philosophies?

To have a commitment in research, we need to have good values (principles or philosophies) which become our references when performing research.

Nowadays, we are surrounding by a modern culture where everything can be obtained (bought) cheaply and easily, changed rapidly and thrown away within a short period.

This modern culture affects our value in research. We become hasty and impatience and then we easily give up and lose our focuses to pursue high quality research. That is, the mindset of “quantity” over “quality” becomes common in many research practices.

The book presents several good values or philosophies. We then can use these values/philosophies to guide our research and achieve high quality results.

Specifically, the book discusses some of essential philosophies such as the influence of tradition, focus on value propositions, build-to-last, patience and quality over quantity.

Those values are explained in detailed with some examples to show how good values can help us achieve good results and competitiveness.

CHAPTER 3: How to make research strategies?

The book presents the way to make a good research strategy so that we can maximise our research impacts.

Strategy is how to position our product or research with respect to competitors and users or customers.

The book covers strategies for four types of research organisations, including academia (university), commercial industry, private research centre and government research centre.

These four organisations will have different research strategies due to their nature of activities and responses for different types of affecting factors, such as the advancement of research by competitors, the bargaining power of funders, the bargaining power or researchers, field obsoleteness threat, government policy and state-of-the-art challenges of disciplines.

The interaction between these factors and different research organisations is complex and the book elaborates in detail about this interaction.

Among various strategies, the book also explains that those different strategies can be grouped into three general strategy types, including strategy to be a research differentiator, be efficient research or be focusing on specific niche topics.

In addition, the book also discusses indicators that can be used by the government to assess whether their research activities have positive impact to the country or not.

CHAPTER 4: How to determine research innovation?

One of the biggest goals of research is to prosper the economy of a country or nation. The question is what type of research that can give significant forces to the growth of a nation is.

The book pinpoints different types of innovations that research is targeting. The various types of innovation include disruptive, sustaining and efficiency innovations.

We need to understand these different types of innovation to understand our expectation regarding our research outputs. All these innovations are important and have their own different aims.

A nation should have a research policy that covers those different types of innovations.

The book will deeply discuss the different types of innovations especially disruptive innovation. Because, only with this disruptive innovation a nation can get a significant economic growth.

Characteristics and type of research that pursue disruptive innovation and why disruptive innovations can create economic growth are discussed in the book.

CHAPTER 5: How to navigate complex research?

In research, we will require to take many decisions to navigate various options to perform our research and achieve our goals, such as minimising research cost and time and maximising results or impacts.

It is not easy to navigate ways through tremendous possible options or alternatives. Too many options will overload our decision processing and may lead to sub-optimal decisions.

For one obvious example, when we are doing research in a specific topic, we will perform literature reviews to find gaps and decide which directions we will go.

Vert often, there are already many articles, including journals, conferences, technical reports and magazines, which are available to read. This abundant resource can be overwhelming.

If we spent 100% of our time just to read all these articles, we may never ever decide what gaps and directions to go for, let alone performing the research.

The book discusses a simple rule way to help us navigate through our long and complex research journeys.

In addition, this book’s chapter also presents several simple rules that have been proposed by prominent researchers. We can copy these rules and apply to our research activities.

CHAPTER 6: How to economically justify research?

Any discussions about money, especially related to research, are always an interesting topic.

One basic fact to know is that research is expensive. However, the fundamental question is whether expensive research can be justified or not.

No matter how expensive research is, as long as we can justify all the cost, the research will be feasible and worth to pursue.

The question is how we can justify research is worth to pursue? What aspects we should look at? Is there any proof of this research justification? And some other relevant questions.

In this chapter, the book gives details background and motivation of why research is always worth o pursue as long as we can justify the cost. Some examples of how expensive research can be justified are also given in this chapter.

Remember, research is a high risk, but high gain activity. When we fail in research, we will lose a tremendous of money. But, the output of the research may be the cause of getting more money in future (in term of more profits).

CHAPTER 7: How to economically value research?

This book’s chapter is related to the previous chapter. However, this chapter is more technical in term of relation to financial calculations.

If the previous chapter gives proofs on how research can be justified, this chapter provide detailed analyses, with financial calculations, on how to justify and value research (in term of money).

Specifically, this chapter explains about what free cash is and how to perform discounted free-cash-flow analysis.

Why cash is important? Well because cash is “king”. In finance, cash is something that is matter and is unambiguous. Any other measure in finance such as earning, profit and many derivations from these measures can be ambiguous.

It is possible that a company has a large net profit but very low, even not have any, cash. And hence, without cash, the company cannot invest or perform research or any other operations.

For example, if we have a large take home pay, it does not mean we can have a good life. If we have a high take home pay but also high liability, we cannot even use our take home pay to fulfil our needs.

Otherwise, if we have low take home pay but we do not have any significant liability, then it means we still have cash that we can use to fulfil what we want to do.

However, when cash is used as a finance measure, this measure is clear. In the sense that a large cash is always better than less cash.

A final detailed presentation in the chapter is the discounted free-cash-flow analysis to quantify what value (in term of money) research can generate.

CHAPTER 8: How to manage research?

Management is always essential in any activity, including research.

Particularly, this chapter discuss how to manage ourselves. Why it is important to manage our self? Well, it is obvious if we cannot manage our self, then we cannot manage others.

This chapter starts by focusing on a researcher is a type of knowledge worker. This knowledge worker has different characteristics compared to other types of workers.

A knowledge worker is like a CEO for themselves. This worker cannot be micro-managed, highly motivated, ambitious and has a high ego.

If these characteristics are not well managed, then no good outputs can be expected from this type of worker.

The chapter presents various characteristics of a knowledge worker, that is a researcher, and how to manage these characteristics.

By managing these characteristics, a researcher can flourish including the group and other researchers where he/she works in and with, respectively.

CHAPTER 9: How to market research?

When we have research outputs or products, the final stage is we need to market them. However, many people think marketing is the last stage when everything is ready.

In this chapter, the book explains what marketing really is and why marketing is influential in every stage of process in research, projects or any activities. We must start marketing activities from the beginning of our research or project and we should use the marketing activities as one of guides for our research or project.

Marketing is instrumental in helping our research to be successful and profitable. Hence, we should view marketing comprehensively and not from a narrow perspective. This chapter shows how marketing can contribute the success of every process of our research or project.

In addition, this chapter presents two main type of marketing strategies, that are 4P and 4C. Both strategies are important for different types of research activities, we need to select which marketing strategy is suitable for our research.

To end, the book gives some execution procedure and examples about all the “research how to” which have been presented in the chapters.

Conclusion

In this post, we have presented a brief summary of the book “Research how to: A practical approach”. We write this book as simple as possible as well as very practical for readers from various backgrounds and levels or research experiences.

This book takes various proven principles from various disciplines, such as management, marketing and finance, and applies those principles to research.

In addition, this book tries to change the paradigm of research from a conventional view (“cost”) to a modern perspective (“value creation”).

To end, readers will learn on how to improve their research activities with those principles to bring their research to the next level.

 Reference

[1] Syam, WP. 2024. Research how to: A practical approach. UKISN.

You can get the book from Amazon here:

Also, you can also get this book from Rakuten Kobo.