What is the goal of research? What is the goal of industrial research? There is no single agreed upon answer to these questions, but I'll share how I think about them.

The goal of research is to identify important hard problems and find solutions that can advance the knowledge and practice of a research discipline. In industrial research, we have an additional goal of improving our company's business by understanding our customers' needs and developing solutions that improve our customers' experiences.

My lab's goal is to make technical contributions that improve experiences and lead to significant impact. In an earlier post I talked about the coupling of experience and technology. This requires understanding user experiences and developing technologies that improve them. In addition, we strive to make technical contributions that have three types of impact: Business impact, Research impact, and Industry impact.

Business impact means making technical contributions that create new business opportunities for the company or improve existing businesses. This requires working closely with the businesses to understand their customer and business needs, developing technologies that can help solve them, and influencing our business partners to adopt these technologies and solutions.

Research impact means identifying difficult research problems, finding solutions, and bringing them to practice. It also means making technical contributions that advance knowledge in the discipline by understanding what is known and unknown and developing theories that explain the unknown.  This involves working with and influencing the research community to increase knowledge and improve practice.

Industry impact means working with customers and industry partners to move the industry forward to solve customer problems. There are very few customer problems that can be solved by one company alone. Rather, solutions require an ecosystem that involves a cooperation between companies. This can involve industrial partnerships to create multi-company solutions. This can also involve standardization to define how products and services made by different companies can interoperate with each other.

Industrial research requires striking a balance between these different types of impact. I view the holy grail as making a series of technical contributions that improve the customer experience... while making the three types of impact... while making the company profitable. Is this tough? Yes. Is it ambitious? Yes. Are there the outputs along the way to this larger ambitious goal useful? Absolutely, and they should be defined as so. But, we won't achieve the holy grail if we don't try!

What are your thoughts? Have you made technical contributions that strike 2 types of impact? Have you made technical contributions that strike all 3 types of impact? Please do share your stories!