2 Goals of Business Research

The Broader Purposes of Business Research

People have always been curious about the natural world, including themselves and their behavior (in fact, such curiosity may be why you’ve decided to start or continue your studies at the University of Groningen!). Science grew out of this natural curiosity and has become the best way to achieve detailed and accurate knowledge. Keep in mind that most of the phenomena and theories that fill academic textbooks are the products of scientific research. In a typical introduction to marketing course for example, one can learn about segmentation or about customer lifetime value, and marketing as a discipline has developed methods to measure customer lifetime value and to segment customers in a quantitative manner.

The Three Goals of Science

The first and most basic goal of science is to describe. This goal is achieved by making careful observations. As an example, perhaps I know different managers, and observe that some are more successful at managing their team than others. I could perform qualitative research, follow these managers, and describe what they do throughout the day. Similarly, I could ask them to participate in a survey in order to gain some sense of how large the difference between successful and less-successful managers actually is. Perhaps in time, such approaches would help me move on towards actually explaining what makes some managers more successful than others.

The second -and, for many, ultimate- goal of science is to explain. This goal involves determining the causes of behavior. For example, I could survey many of the aforementioned managers and ask them all kinds of questions on their personality, management style, or other relevant characteristics. Subsequently, I could collect data from the members of their team to assess how effective they think their manager is, or perhaps collect some more objective measure of success. I could then use statistical methods to see whether these things are related. If I find that they are, I have improved my understanding of which factors specifically make managers successful, and how important each of these factors is. If I find no connection between these factors and manager success, I may need to revise my ideas of which factors are important and why. Therefore, in each case, we have learned something.

The third and final goal of science is to predict. Once we have observed with some regularity that two behaviors or events are systematically related to one another, we can use that information to predict whether an event or behavior will occur in a certain situation. Once I understand which factors drive managers’ success, I can predict whether a job candidate I would want to hire is likely to be (or become) a successful manager by thinking about how they ‘score’ on the set of characteristics that would make a manager successful. Prediction is relevant in many different disciplines. In marketing, being able to predict whether and why customers switch to a competitor is relevant for predicting how well a firm will do in the future. Similarly, being able to predict whether patients suffer from specific medical conditions, or whether certain medicines would help, is incredibly useful for medicine as a discipline.

Basic versus Applied Research

Scientific research is often classified as being either basic or applied. Basic research is conducted primarily for the sake of achieving a more detailed and accurate understanding of human behavior, without necessarily trying to address any particular practical problem. In contrast, Applied research is conducted primarily to address some practical problem. Research on the effects of cell phone use on driving, for example, was prompted by safety concerns and has led to the enactment of laws to limit this practice. Although the distinction between basic and applied research is convenient, it is not always clear-cut. Many papers have both a ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ element to them, and many excellent studies contribute both to theoretical and practical understanding.