Building a research repository is quite important for researchers to maintain and preserving the insights that we discover from previous research by yourself and another researcher colleague can be beneficial for the stakeholder, even for the researcher itself. Based on experiences, having an integrated and well-connected research repository could improve the quality of the research itself by providing an enormous amount of knowledge.
In some cases, a researcher wants to conduct research about how a user responds to additional offerings when making a purchase. Ideally, what researchers need to do is to get familiar with the topic itself before creating a research plan. It can start by reading articles that are related to the topic, discussing it with other researchers, or reading previous research that is related to it.
It appears to be straightforward and not too difficult to accomplish, but it is not as simple as it appears. The difficulty in accessing this material by researchers is a widespread concern. A proper research repository considers not only how the resource can be preserved and archived, but also how the resource can be made accessible to researchers in a timely and efficient manner.
During my personal learning journey on research repository, I found an interesting framework provided by Dualo, which explains about 3 main highlights of research excellent flywheel, that can be achieved by building a research repository:
Consolidate — It’s about consolidating research findings across the teams and tools within an organization. The aim of consolidation is centralizing and index supporting research material to make previous work more accessible.
Discover — Collaborating with other researchers to discover actionable insights. Building a proper research repository can enable capability to discover actionable insights from previous research material that is archived.
Distribute — Distributing valuable knowledge to other teams and wider product stakeholders.
Framework by Dualo, taken on my LiquidText PDF worksheet.
Based on three researchers’ excellent flywheels, I started prototyping my own research repository in tiket.com. Based on my experience, there is no such thing as a silver bullet in building a research repository. When implementing a research repository, what you need to consider is how the researcher in your organization can be comfortable to interact with. It’s really similar to the designing process, in which case, your main user is yourself and the other researchers. We need to understand what is the main concern among researchers when it comes to a research repository.