how to create a research strategy

• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

Research strategy guide for finding quality, credible sources

Strategies for finding academic studies and other information you need to give your stories authority and depth

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Keely Wilczek, The Journalist's Resource May 20, 2011

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/home/research-strategy-guide/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Knowing how to conduct deeper research efficiently and effectively is a critical skill for journalists — especially in the information age. It is, like other facets of the profession such as interviewing, a matter of practice and establishing good habits. And once you find a successful routine for information-gathering, it will pay dividends time and again.

Journalists need to be able to do many kinds of research. This article focuses on creating a research strategy that will help you find academic studies and related scholarly information. These sources can, among other things, give your stories extra authority and depth — and thereby distinguish your work. You can see examples of such studies — and find many relevant ones for your stories — by searching the Journalist’s Resource database . But that is just a representative sample of what exists in the research world.

The first step is to create a plan for seeking the information you need. This requires you to take time initially and to proceed with care, but it will ultimately pay off in better results. The research strategy covered in this article involves the following steps:

Get organized

Articulate your topic, locate background information.

• Identify your information needs

List keywords and concepts for search engines and databases

Consider the scope of your topic, conduct your searches, evaluate the information sources you found, analyze and adjust your research strategy.

Being organized is an essential part of effective research strategy. You should create a record of your strategy and your searches. This will prevent you from repeating searches in the same resources and from continuing to use ineffective terms. It will also help you assess the success or failure of your research strategy as you go through the process. You also may want to consider tracking and organizing citations and links in bibliographic software such as Zotero . (See this helpful resource guide about using Zotero.)

Next, write out your topic in a clear and concise manner. Good research starts with a specific focus.

For example, let’s say you are writing a story about the long-range health effects of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant based on a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives titled, “The Chernobyl Accident 20 Years On: An Assessment of the Health Consequences and the International Response.” (The study is summarized in Journalist’s Resource here .)

A statement of your topic might be, “Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, scientists are still learning the affects of the accident on the health of those who lived in the surrounding area and their descendants.”

If you have a good understanding of the Chernobyl disaster, proceed to the next step, “Identify the information you need.” If not, it’s time to gather background information. This will supply you with the whos and the whens of the topic. It will also provide you with a broader context as well as the important terminology.

Excellent sources of background information are subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries, books, and scholarly articles, and organizations’ websites. You should always consult more than one source so you can compare for accuracy and bias.

For your story about Chernobyl, you might want to consult some of the following sources:

• Frequently Asked Chernobyl Questions , International Atomic Agency
• Chernobyl Accident 1986 , World Nuclear Association
• Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment , New York Academy of Sciences, 2009.
• “Chernobyl Disaster,” Encyclopedia Britannica, last updated 2013.

Identify the information you need

What information do you need to write your story? One way to determine this is to turn your overall topic into a list of questions to be answered. This will help you identify the type and level of information you need. Some possible questions on consequences of the Chernobyl accident are:

• What are the proven health effects?
• What are some theorized health effects?
• Is there controversy about any of these studies?
• What geographic area is being studied?
• What are the demographic characteristics of the population being studied?
• Was there anything that could have been done at the time to mitigate these effects?

Looking at these questions, it appears that scientific studies and scholarly articles about those studies, demographic data, disaster response analysis, and government documents and publications from the Soviet Union and Ukraine would be needed.

Now you need to determine what words you will use to enter in the search boxes within resources. One way to begin is to extract the most important words and phrases from the questions produced in the previous step. Next, think about alternative words and phrases that you might use. Always keep in mind that different people may write or talk about the same topic in different ways. Important concepts can referred to differently or be spelled differently depending on country of origin or field of study.

For the Chernobyl health story, some search keyword options are: “Chernobyl,” “Chornobyl”; “disaster,” “catastrophe,” “explosion”; “health,” “disease,” “illness,” “medical conditions”; “genetic mutation,” “gene mutation,” “germ-line mutation,” “hereditary disease.” Used in different combinations, these can unearth a wide variety of resources.

Next you should identify the scope of your topic and any limitations it puts on your searches. Some examples of limitations are language, publication date, and publication type. Every database and search engine will have its own rules so you may need to click on an advanced search option in order to input these limitations.

It is finally time to start looking for information but identifying which resources to use is not always easy to do. First, if you are part of an organization, find out what, if any, resources you have access to through a subscription. Examples of subscription resources are LexisNexis and JSTOR. If your organization does not provide subscription resources, find out if you can get access to these sources through your local library. Should you not have access to any subscription resources appropriate for your topic, look at some of the many useful free resources on the internet.

Here are some examples of sources for free information:

• PLoS , Public Library of Science
• Google Scholar
• SSRN , Social Science Research Network
• FDsys , U.S. Government documents and publications
• World Development Indicators , World Bank
• Pubmed , service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine

More quality sites, and search tips, are here among the other research articles at Journalist’s Resource.

As you only want information from the most reliable and suitable sources, you should always evaluate your results. In doing this, you can apply journalism’s Five W’s (and One H):

• Who : Who is the author and what are his/her credentials in this topic?
• What: Is the material primary or secondary in nature?
• Where: Is the publisher or organization behind the source considered reputable? Does the website appear legitimate?
• When: Is the source current or does it cover the right time period for your topic?
• Why: Is the opinion or bias of the author apparent and can it be taken into account?
• How: Is the source written at the right level for your needs? Is the research well-documented?

Were you able to locate the information you needed? If not, now it is time to analyze why that happened. Perhaps there are better resources or different keywords and concepts you could have tried. Additional background information might supply you with other terminology to use. It is also possible that the information you need is just not available in the way you need it and it may be necessary to consult others for assistance like an expert in the topic or a professional librarian.

Keely Wilczek is a research librarian at the Harvard Kennedy School. Tags: training

About The Author

Keely Wilczek

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, automatically generate references for free.

• Knowledge Base
• Methodology

Research Design | Step-by-Step Guide with Examples

Published on 5 May 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on 20 March 2023.

A research design is a strategy for answering your research question  using empirical data. Creating a research design means making decisions about:

• Your overall aims and approach
• The type of research design you’ll use
• Your sampling methods or criteria for selecting subjects
• Your data collection methods
• The procedures you’ll follow to collect data
• Your data analysis methods

A well-planned research design helps ensure that your methods match your research aims and that you use the right kind of analysis for your data.

Table of contents

Step 1: consider your aims and approach, step 2: choose a type of research design, step 3: identify your population and sampling method, step 4: choose your data collection methods, step 5: plan your data collection procedures, step 6: decide on your data analysis strategies, frequently asked questions.

• Introduction

Before you can start designing your research, you should already have a clear idea of the research question you want to investigate.

There are many different ways you could go about answering this question. Your research design choices should be driven by your aims and priorities – start by thinking carefully about what you want to achieve.

The first choice you need to make is whether you’ll take a qualitative or quantitative approach.

Qualitative research designs tend to be more flexible and inductive , allowing you to adjust your approach based on what you find throughout the research process.

Quantitative research designs tend to be more fixed and deductive , with variables and hypotheses clearly defined in advance of data collection.

It’s also possible to use a mixed methods design that integrates aspects of both approaches. By combining qualitative and quantitative insights, you can gain a more complete picture of the problem you’re studying and strengthen the credibility of your conclusions.

Practical and ethical considerations when designing research

As well as scientific considerations, you need to think practically when designing your research. If your research involves people or animals, you also need to consider research ethics .

• How much time do you have to collect data and write up the research?
• Will you be able to gain access to the data you need (e.g., by travelling to a specific location or contacting specific people)?
• Do you have the necessary research skills (e.g., statistical analysis or interview techniques)?
• Will you need ethical approval ?

At each stage of the research design process, make sure that your choices are practically feasible.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Within both qualitative and quantitative approaches, there are several types of research design to choose from. Each type provides a framework for the overall shape of your research.

Types of quantitative research designs

Quantitative designs can be split into four main types. Experimental and   quasi-experimental designs allow you to test cause-and-effect relationships, while descriptive and correlational designs allow you to measure variables and describe relationships between them.

With descriptive and correlational designs, you can get a clear picture of characteristics, trends, and relationships as they exist in the real world. However, you can’t draw conclusions about cause and effect (because correlation doesn’t imply causation ).

Experiments are the strongest way to test cause-and-effect relationships without the risk of other variables influencing the results. However, their controlled conditions may not always reflect how things work in the real world. They’re often also more difficult and expensive to implement.

Types of qualitative research designs

Qualitative designs are less strictly defined. This approach is about gaining a rich, detailed understanding of a specific context or phenomenon, and you can often be more creative and flexible in designing your research.

The table below shows some common types of qualitative design. They often have similar approaches in terms of data collection, but focus on different aspects when analysing the data.

Your research design should clearly define who or what your research will focus on, and how you’ll go about choosing your participants or subjects.

In research, a population is the entire group that you want to draw conclusions about, while a sample is the smaller group of individuals you’ll actually collect data from.

Defining the population

A population can be made up of anything you want to study – plants, animals, organisations, texts, countries, etc. In the social sciences, it most often refers to a group of people.

For example, will you focus on people from a specific demographic, region, or background? Are you interested in people with a certain job or medical condition, or users of a particular product?

The more precisely you define your population, the easier it will be to gather a representative sample.

Sampling methods

Even with a narrowly defined population, it’s rarely possible to collect data from every individual. Instead, you’ll collect data from a sample.

To select a sample, there are two main approaches: probability sampling and non-probability sampling . The sampling method you use affects how confidently you can generalise your results to the population as a whole.

Probability sampling is the most statistically valid option, but it’s often difficult to achieve unless you’re dealing with a very small and accessible population.

For practical reasons, many studies use non-probability sampling, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations and carefully consider potential biases. You should always make an effort to gather a sample that’s as representative as possible of the population.

Case selection in qualitative research

In some types of qualitative designs, sampling may not be relevant.

For example, in an ethnography or a case study, your aim is to deeply understand a specific context, not to generalise to a population. Instead of sampling, you may simply aim to collect as much data as possible about the context you are studying.

In these types of design, you still have to carefully consider your choice of case or community. You should have a clear rationale for why this particular case is suitable for answering your research question.

For example, you might choose a case study that reveals an unusual or neglected aspect of your research problem, or you might choose several very similar or very different cases in order to compare them.

Data collection methods are ways of directly measuring variables and gathering information. They allow you to gain first-hand knowledge and original insights into your research problem.

You can choose just one data collection method, or use several methods in the same study.

Survey methods

Surveys allow you to collect data about opinions, behaviours, experiences, and characteristics by asking people directly. There are two main survey methods to choose from: questionnaires and interviews.

Observation methods

Observations allow you to collect data unobtrusively, observing characteristics, behaviours, or social interactions without relying on self-reporting.

Observations may be conducted in real time, taking notes as you observe, or you might make audiovisual recordings for later analysis. They can be qualitative or quantitative.

Other methods of data collection

There are many other ways you might collect data depending on your field and topic.

If you’re not sure which methods will work best for your research design, try reading some papers in your field to see what data collection methods they used.

Secondary data

If you don’t have the time or resources to collect data from the population you’re interested in, you can also choose to use secondary data that other researchers already collected – for example, datasets from government surveys or previous studies on your topic.

With this raw data, you can do your own analysis to answer new research questions that weren’t addressed by the original study.

Using secondary data can expand the scope of your research, as you may be able to access much larger and more varied samples than you could collect yourself.

However, it also means you don’t have any control over which variables to measure or how to measure them, so the conclusions you can draw may be limited.

As well as deciding on your methods, you need to plan exactly how you’ll use these methods to collect data that’s consistent, accurate, and unbiased.

Planning systematic procedures is especially important in quantitative research, where you need to precisely define your variables and ensure your measurements are reliable and valid.

Operationalisation

Some variables, like height or age, are easily measured. But often you’ll be dealing with more abstract concepts, like satisfaction, anxiety, or competence. Operationalisation means turning these fuzzy ideas into measurable indicators.

If you’re using observations , which events or actions will you count?

If you’re using surveys , which questions will you ask and what range of responses will be offered?

You may also choose to use or adapt existing materials designed to measure the concept you’re interested in – for example, questionnaires or inventories whose reliability and validity has already been established.

Reliability and validity

Reliability means your results can be consistently reproduced , while validity means that you’re actually measuring the concept you’re interested in.

For valid and reliable results, your measurement materials should be thoroughly researched and carefully designed. Plan your procedures to make sure you carry out the same steps in the same way for each participant.

If you’re developing a new questionnaire or other instrument to measure a specific concept, running a pilot study allows you to check its validity and reliability in advance.

Sampling procedures

As well as choosing an appropriate sampling method, you need a concrete plan for how you’ll actually contact and recruit your selected sample.

That means making decisions about things like:

• How many participants do you need for an adequate sample size?
• What inclusion and exclusion criteria will you use to identify eligible participants?
• How will you contact your sample – by mail, online, by phone, or in person?

If you’re using a probability sampling method, it’s important that everyone who is randomly selected actually participates in the study. How will you ensure a high response rate?

If you’re using a non-probability method, how will you avoid bias and ensure a representative sample?

Data management

It’s also important to create a data management plan for organising and storing your data.

Will you need to transcribe interviews or perform data entry for observations? You should anonymise and safeguard any sensitive data, and make sure it’s backed up regularly.

Keeping your data well organised will save time when it comes to analysing them. It can also help other researchers validate and add to your findings.

On their own, raw data can’t answer your research question. The last step of designing your research is planning how you’ll analyse the data.

Quantitative data analysis

In quantitative research, you’ll most likely use some form of statistical analysis . With statistics, you can summarise your sample data, make estimates, and test hypotheses.

Using descriptive statistics , you can summarise your sample data in terms of:

• The distribution of the data (e.g., the frequency of each score on a test)
• The central tendency of the data (e.g., the mean to describe the average score)
• The variability of the data (e.g., the standard deviation to describe how spread out the scores are)

The specific calculations you can do depend on the level of measurement of your variables.

Using inferential statistics , you can:

• Make estimates about the population based on your sample data.
• Test hypotheses about a relationship between variables.

Regression and correlation tests look for associations between two or more variables, while comparison tests (such as t tests and ANOVAs ) look for differences in the outcomes of different groups.

Your choice of statistical test depends on various aspects of your research design, including the types of variables you’re dealing with and the distribution of your data.

Qualitative data analysis

In qualitative research, your data will usually be very dense with information and ideas. Instead of summing it up in numbers, you’ll need to comb through the data in detail, interpret its meanings, identify patterns, and extract the parts that are most relevant to your research question.

Two of the most common approaches to doing this are thematic analysis and discourse analysis .

There are many other ways of analysing qualitative data depending on the aims of your research. To get a sense of potential approaches, try reading some qualitative research papers in your field.

A sample is a subset of individuals from a larger population. Sampling means selecting the group that you will actually collect data from in your research.

For example, if you are researching the opinions of students in your university, you could survey a sample of 100 students.

Statistical sampling allows you to test a hypothesis about the characteristics of a population. There are various sampling methods you can use to ensure that your sample is representative of the population as a whole.

Operationalisation means turning abstract conceptual ideas into measurable observations.

For example, the concept of social anxiety isn’t directly observable, but it can be operationally defined in terms of self-rating scores, behavioural avoidance of crowded places, or physical anxiety symptoms in social situations.

Before collecting data , it’s important to consider how you will operationalise the variables that you want to measure.

The research methods you use depend on the type of data you need to answer your research question .

• If you want to measure something or test a hypothesis , use quantitative methods . If you want to explore ideas, thoughts, and meanings, use qualitative methods .
• If you want to analyse a large amount of readily available data, use secondary data. If you want data specific to your purposes with control over how they are generated, collect primary data.
• If you want to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables , use experimental methods. If you want to understand the characteristics of a research subject, use descriptive methods.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, March 20). Research Design | Step-by-Step Guide with Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 27 May 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/research-methods/research-design/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

15 Steps to Good Research

• Define and articulate a research question (formulate a research hypothesis). How to Write a Thesis Statement (Indiana University)
• Identify possible sources of information in many types and formats. Georgetown University Library's Research & Course Guides
• Judge the scope of the project.
• Reevaluate the research question based on the nature and extent of information available and the parameters of the research project.
• Select the most appropriate investigative methods (surveys, interviews, experiments) and research tools (periodical indexes, databases, websites).
• Plan the research project. Writing Anxiety (UNC-Chapel Hill) Strategies for Academic Writing (SUNY Empire State College)
• Retrieve information using a variety of methods (draw on a repertoire of skills).
• Refine the search strategy as necessary.
• Write and organize useful notes and keep track of sources. Taking Notes from Research Reading (University of Toronto) Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks
• Evaluate sources using appropriate criteria. Evaluating Internet Sources
• Synthesize, analyze and integrate information sources and prior knowledge. Georgetown University Writing Center
• Revise hypothesis as necessary.
• Use information effectively for a specific purpose.
• Understand such issues as plagiarism, ownership of information (implications of copyright to some extent), and costs of information. Georgetown University Honor Council Copyright Basics (Purdue University) How to Recognize Plagiarism: Tutorials and Tests from Indiana University
• Cite properly and give credit for sources of ideas. MLA Bibliographic Form (7th edition, 2009) MLA Bibliographic Form (8th edition, 2016) Turabian Bibliographic Form: Footnote/Endnote Turabian Bibliographic Form: Parenthetical Reference Use a citation manager: Zotero or Refworks

Adapted from the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries "Objectives for Information Literacy Instruction" , which are more complete and include outcomes. See also the broader "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education."

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

VII. Researched Writing

7.3 Developing a Research Strategy

Deborah Bernnard; Greg Bobish; Jenna Hecker; Irina Holden; Allison Hosier; Trudi Jacobson; Tor Loney; Daryl Bullis; and Sarah LeMire

Sarah’s art history professor just assigned the course project and Sarah is delighted that it isn’t the typical research paper. Rather, it involves putting together a website to help readers understand a topic. It will certainly help Sarah get a grasp on the topic herself. Learning by attempting to teach others, she agrees, might be a good idea. The professor wants the website to be written for people who are interested in the topic and with backgrounds similar to the students in the course. Sarah likes that a target audience is defined, and since she has a good idea of what her friends might understand and what they would need more help with, she thinks it will be easier to know what to include in her site…well, at least easier than writing a paper for an expert like her professor.

An interesting feature of this course is that the professor has formed the students into teams. Sarah wasn’t sure she liked this idea at the beginning, but it seems to be working out okay. Sarah’s team has decided that their topic for this website will be 19 th century women painters. Her teammate Chris seems concerned: “Isn’t that an awfully big topic?” The team checks with the professor who agrees they would be taking on far more than they could successfully explain on their website. He suggests they develop a draft thesis statement to help them focus, and after several false starts, they come up with:

The involvement of women painters in the Impressionist movement had an effect upon the subjects portrayed.

They decide this sounds more manageable. Because Sarah doesn’t feel comfortable on the technical aspects of setting up the website, she offers to start locating resources that will help them to develop the site’s content. The next time the class meets, Sarah tells her teammates what she has done so far:

“I thought I’d start with some scholarly sources, since they should be helpful, right? I put a search into the online catalog for the library, but nothing came up! The library should have books on this topic, shouldn’t it? I typed the search in exactly as we have it in our thesis statement. That was so frustrating. Since that didn’t work, I tried Google, and put in the search. I got over 8 million results, but when I looked over the ones on the first page, they didn’t seem very useful. One was about the feminist art movement in the 1960s, not during the Impressionist period. The results all seemed to have the words I typed highlighted, but most really weren’t useful. I am sorry I don’t have much to show you. Do you think we should change our topic?”

Alisha suggests that Sarah talk with a reference librarian . She mentions that a librarian came to talk to one of her other classes about doing research, and it was really helpful. Alisha thinks that maybe Sarah shouldn’t have entered the entire thesis statement as the search, and maybe she should have tried databases to find articles. The team decides to brainstorm all the search tools and resources they can think of.

Here’s what they came up with:

Brainstormed List of Search Tools and Resources

Based on your experience, do you see anything you would add?

Sarah and her team think that their list is pretty good. They decide to take it further and list the advantages and limitations of each search tool, at least as far as they can determine.

Brainstormed Advantages and Disadvantages of Search Tools and Resources

Alisha suggests that Sarah should show the worksheet to a librarian and volunteers to go with her. The librarian, Mr. Harrison, says they have made a really good start, but he can fill them in on some other search strategies that will help them to focus on their topic. He asks if Sarah and Alisha would like to learn more.

Let’s step back from this case study and think about the elements that someone doing research should plan before starting to enter search terms in Google, Wikipedia, or even a scholarly database. There is some preparation you can do to make things go much more smoothly than they have for Sarah.

Self-Reflection

As you work through your own research quests, it is very important to be self-reflective. Consider:

• What do you really need to find?
• Do you need to learn more about the general subject before you can identify the focus of your search?
• How thoroughly did you develop your search strategy?
• Did you spend enough time finding the best tools to search?
• What is going really well, so well that you’ll want to remember to do it in the future?

Another term for what you are doing is metacognition, or thinking about your thinking. Reflect on what Sarah is going through. Does some of it sound familiar based on your own experiences? You may already know some of the strategies presented here. Do you do them the same way? How does it work? What pieces are new to you? When might you follow this advice? Don’t just let the words flow over you; rather, think carefully about the explanation of the process. You may disagree with some of what you read. If you do, follow through and test both methods to see which provides better results.

Selecting Search Tools

After you have thought the planning process through more thoroughly, think about the best place to find information for your topic and for the type of paper. Part of planning to do research is determining which search tools will be the best ones to use. This applies whether you are doing scholarly research or trying to answer a question in your everyday life, such as what would be the best place to go on vacation. “Search tools” might be a bit misleading since a person might be the source of the information you need. Or it might be a web search engine , a specialized database , an association—the possibilities are endless. Often people automatically search Google first, regardless of what they are looking for. Choosing the wrong search tool may just waste your time and provide only mediocre information, whereas other sources might provide really spot-on information and quickly, too. In some cases, a carefully constructed search on Google, particularly using the advanced search option, will provide the necessary information, but other times it won’t. This is true of all sources: make an informed choice about which ones to use for a specific need.

So, how do you identify search tools? Let’s begin with a first-rate method. For academic research, talking with a librarian or your professor is a great start. They will direct you to those specialized tools that will provide access to what you need. If you ask a librarian for help, they may also show you some tips about searching in the resources. This section will cover some of the generic strategies that will work in many search tools, but a librarian can show you very specific ways to focus your search and retrieve the most useful items.

If neither your professor nor a librarian is available when you need help, take a look at the TAMU Libraries website . There is a Help button in the top right corner of the website that will direct you to assistance via phone, chat, text, and email. Under the Guides button, you’ll find class- and subject-related guides that list useful databases and other resources for particular classes and majors to assist researchers. There is also a directory of the databases the library subscribes to and the subjects they cover. Take advantage of the expertise of librarians by using such guides. Novice researchers usually don’t think of looking for this type of help and, as a consequence, often waste time.

When you are looking for non-academic material, consider who cares about this type of information. Who works with it? Who produces it or the help guides for it? Some sources are really obvious and you are already using them—for example, if you need information about the weather in London three days from now, you might check Weather.com for London’s forecast. You don’t go to a library (in person or online), and you don’t do a research database search. For other information you need, think the same way. Are you looking for anecdotal information on old railroads? Find out if there is an organization of railroad buffs. You can search on the web for this kind of information or, if you know about and have access to it, you could check the Encyclopedia of Associations. This source provides entries for all U.S. membership organizations which can quickly lead you to a potentially wonderful source of information. Librarians can point you to tools like these.

Consider Asking an Expert

Have you thought about using people, not just inanimate sources, as a way to obtain information? This might be particularly appropriate if you are working on an emerging topic or a topic with local connections. There are a variety of reasons that talking with someone will add to your research.

For personal interactions, there are other specific things you can do to obtain better results. Do some background work on the topic before contacting the person you hope to interview. The more familiarity you have with your topic and its terminology, the easier it will be to ask focused questions. Focused questions are important if you want to get into the meat of what you need. Asking general questions because you think the specifics might be too detailed rarely leads to the best information. Acknowledge the time and effort someone is taking to answer your questions, but also realize that people who are passionate about subjects enjoy sharing what they know. Take the opportunity to ask experts about sources they would recommend. One good place to start is with the librarians at the Texas A&M University Libraries. Visit the library information page for details on how to contact a librarian. [1]

Determining Search Concepts and Keywords

Once you’ve selected some good resources for your topic, and possibly talked with an expert, it is time to move on to identify words you will use to search for information on your topic in various databases and search engines. This is sometimes referred to as building a search query . When deciding what terms to use in a search, break down your topic into its main concepts. Don’t enter an entire sentence or a full question. Different databases and search engines process such queries in different ways, but many look for the entire phrase you enter as a complete unit rather than the component words. While some will focus on just the important words, such as Sarah’s Google search that you read about earlier in this chapter, the results are often still unsatisfactory. The best thing to do is to use the key concepts involved with your topic. In addition, think of synonyms or related terms for each concept. If you do this, you will have more flexibility when searching in case your first search term doesn’t produce any or enough results. This may sound strange since, if you are looking for information using a Web search engine, you almost always get too many results. Databases, however, contain fewer items, and having alternative search terms may lead you to useful sources. Even in a search engine like Google, having terms you can combine thoughtfully will yield better results.

The worksheet in Figure 7.3.1 [2] is an example of a process you can use to come up with search terms. It illustrates how you might think about the topic of violence in high schools. Notice that this exact phrase is not what will be used for the search. Rather, it is a starting point for identifying the terms that will eventually be used.

Example Search Term Brainstorming Worksheet

Now, use a clean copy of the same worksheet (Figure 7.3.2) [3] to think about the topic Sarah’s team is working on. How might you divide their topic into concepts and then search terms? Keep in mind that the number of concepts will depend on what you are searching for and that the search terms may be synonyms or narrower terms. Occasionally, you may be searching for something very specific, and in those cases, you may need to use broader terms as well. Jot down your ideas, then compare what you have written to the information on the second, completed worksheet (Figure 7.3.3) [4] and identify three differences.

Boolean Operators

Once you have the concepts you want to search, you need to think about how you will enter them into the search box. Often, but not always, Boolean operators will help you. You may be familiar with Boolean operators as they provide a way to link terms. There are three Boolean operators: AND , OR , and NOT . (Note: Some databases require Boolean operators to be in all caps while others will accept the terms in either upper or lower case.

We will start by capturing the ideas of the women creating the art. We will use women painters and women artists as the first step in our sample search. You could do two separate searches by typing one or the other of the terms into the search box of whatever tool you are using:

women painters women artists

You would end up with two separate results lists and have the added headache of trying to identify unique items from the lists. You could also search on the phrase:

women painters AND women artists

But once you understand Boolean operators, that last strategy won’t make as much sense as it seems to. The first Boolean operator is AND. AND is used to get the intersection of all the terms you wish to include in your search. With this example,

you are asking that the items you retrieve have both of those terms. If an item only has one term, it won’t show up in the results. This is not what the searcher had in mind—she is interested in both artists and painters because she doesn’t know which term might be used. She doesn’t intend that both terms have to be used. Let’s go on to the next Boolean operator, which will help us out with this problem.

OR is used when you want at least one of the terms to show up in the search results. If both do, that’s fine, but it isn’t a condition of the search. So OR makes a lot more sense for this search:

women painters OR women artists

Now, if you want to get fancy with this search, you could use both AND as well as OR :

women AND (painters OR artists)

The parentheses mean that these two concepts, painters and artists, should be searched as a unit, and the search results should include all items that use one word or the other. The results will then be limited to those items that contain the word women . If you decide to use parentheses for appropriate searches, make sure that the items contained within them are related in some way. With OR , as in our example, it means either of the terms will work. With AND , it means that both terms will appear in the document.

Type both of the searches above in Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) and compare the results.

• Were they the same?
• If not, can you determine what happened?
• Which results list looked better?

Here is another example of a search string using both parentheses and two Boolean operators:

entrepreneurship AND (adolescents OR teens)

In this search, you are looking for entrepreneurial initiatives connected with people in their teens. Because there are so many ways to categorize this age group, it makes sense to indicate that either of these terms should appear in the results along with entrepreneurship.

The search string above isn’t perfect. Can you pick out two problems with the search terms?

The third Boolean operator, NOT , can be problematic. NOT is used to exclude items from your search. If you have decided, based on the scope of the results you are getting, to focus only on a specific aspect of a topic, use NOT , but be aware that items are being lost in this search.

For example, if you entered

entrepreneurship AND (adolescents OR teens) NOT adults

you might lose some good results.

Why might you lose some good results using the search above?

Other Helpful Search Techniques

Using Boolean operators isn’t the only way you can create more useful searches. In this section, we will review several others.

In this search:

entrepreneurs AND (adolescents OR teens)

you might think that the items that are retrieved from the search can refer to entrepreneurs and to terms from the same root, like entrepreneurship. But because computers are very literal, they usually look for the exact terms you enter. While some search engines like Google are moving beyond this model, library databases tend to require more precision. Truncation, or searching on the root of a word and whatever follows, is how you can tell the database to do this type of search.

So, if you search on:

entrepreneur * AND (adolescents OR teens)

You will get items that refer to entrepreneur , but also entrepreneurship .

Look at these examples:

adolescen * educat *

Think of two or three words you might retrieve when searching on these roots. It is important to consider the results you might get and alter the root if need be. An example of this is polic * . Would it be a good idea to use this root if you wanted to search on policy or policies ? Why or why not?

In some cases, a symbol other than an asterisk is used. To determine what symbol to use, check the help section in whatever resource you are using. The topic should show up under the truncation or stemming headings.

Phrase Searches

Phrase searches are particularly useful when searching the web. If you put the exact phrase you want to search in quotation marks, you will only get items with those words as a phrase and not items where the words appear separately in a document, website, or other resource. Your results will usually be fewer, although surprisingly, this is not always the case.

Try these two searches in the search engine of your choice:

• “ essay exam” 

Was there a difference in the quality and quantity of results?

If you would like to find out if the database or search engine you are using allows phrase searching and the conventions for doing so, search the help section. These help tools can be very, well, helpful!

Advanced Searches

Advanced searching allows you to refine your search query and prompts you for ways to do this. Consider the basic Google search box. It is very minimalistic, but that minimalism is deceptive. It gives the impression that searching is easy and encourages you to just enter your topic without much thought to get results. You certainly do get many results, but are they really good results? Simple search boxes do many searchers a disfavor. There is a better way to enter searches.

Advanced search screens show you many of the options available to you to refine your search and, therefore, get more manageable numbers of better items. Many web search engines include advanced search screens, as do databases for searching research materials. Advanced search screens will vary from resource to resource and from web search engine to research database, but they often let you search using:

• Implied Boolean operators (for example, the “all the words” option is the same as using the Boolean AND );
• Limiters for date, domain (.edu, for example), type of resource (articles, book reviews, patents);
• Field (a field is a standard element, such as title of publication or author’s name);
• Phrase (rather than entering quote marks) Let’s see how this works in practice.

Practical Application: Google Searches

Go to the advanced search option in Google. You can find it at http://www.google.com/advanced_search

Take a look at the options Google provides to refine your search. Compare this to the basic Google search box. One of the best ways you can become a better searcher for information is to use the power of advanced searches, either by using these more complex search screens or by remembering to use Boolean operators, phrase searches, truncation, and other options available to you in most search engines and databases.

While many of the text boxes at the top of the Google Advanced Search page mirror concepts already covered in this section (for example, “this exact word or phrase” allows you to omit the quotes in a phrase search), the options for narrowing your results can be powerful. You can limit your search to a particular domain (such as .edu for items from educational institutions) or you can search for items you can reuse legally (with attribution, of course!) by making use of the “usage rights” option. However, be careful with some of the options as they may excessively limit your results. If you aren’t certain about a particular option, try your search with and without using it and compare the results. If you use a search engine other than Google, check to see if it offers an advanced search option: many do.

Subject Headings

In the section on advanced searches, you read about field searching. To explain further, if you know that the last name of the author whose work you are seeking is Wood, and that he worked on forestry-related topics, you can do a far better search using the author field. Just think what you would get in the way of results if you entered a basic search such as forestry AND wood . It is great to use the appropriate Boolean operator, but oh, the results you will get! But what if you specified that wood had to show up as part of the author’s name? This would limit your results quite a bit.

So what about forestry ? Is there a way to handle that using a field search? The answer is yes. Subject headings are terms that are assigned to items to group them. An example is cars—you could also call them autos, automobiles, or even more specific labels like SUVs or vans. You might use the Boolean operator OR and string these all together. But if you found out that the sources you are searching use automobiles as the subject heading, you wouldn’t have to worry about all these related terms, and could confidently use their subject heading and get all the results, even if the author of the piece uses cars and not automobiles .

How does this work? In many databases, a person called an indexer or cataloger scrutinizes and enters each item. This person performs helpful, behind-the-scenes tasks such as assigning subject headings, age levels, or other indicators that make it easier to search very precisely. An analogy is tagging, although indexing is more structured than tagging. If you have tagged items online, you know that you can use any terms you like and that they may be very different from someone else’s tags. With indexing, the indexer chooses from a set group of terms. Obviously, this precise indexing isn’t available for web search engines—it would be impossible to index everything on the web. But if you are searching in a database, make sure you use these features to make your searches more precise and your results lists more relevant. You also will definitely save time.

You may be thinking that this sounds good. Saving time when doing research is a great idea. But how will you know what subject headings exist so you can use them? Here is a trick that librarians use. Even librarians don’t know what terms are used in all the databases or online catalogs that they use, so a librarian’s starting point isn’t very far from yours. But they do know to use whatever features a database provides to do an effective search. They find out about them by acting like a detective.

You’ve already thought about the possible search terms for your information needs. Enter the best search strategy you developed which might use Boolean operators or truncation. Scan the results to see if they seem to be on topic. If they aren’t, figure out what results you are getting that just aren’t right and revise your search. Terms you have searched on often show up in bold face type so they are easy to pick out. Besides checking the titles of the results, read the abstracts (or summaries), if there are any. You may get some ideas for other terms to use. But if your results are fairly good, scan them with the intent to find one or two items that seem to be precisely what you need. Get to the full record (or entry), where you can see all the details entered by the indexers. Figure 7.3.4 [5]  is an example from the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Quick Search, but keep in mind that the catalog or database you are using may have entries that look very different.

Once you have the “full” record (which does not refer to the full text of the item, but rather the full descriptive details about the book, including author, subjects, date, and place of publication, and so on), look at the subject headings and see what words are used. They may be called descriptors or some other term, but they should be recognizable as subjects. They may be identical to the terms you entered but if not, revise your search using the subject heading words. The result list should now contain items that are relevant for your needs.

It is tempting to think that once you have gone through all the processes around the circle, as seen in the diagram in Figure 7.3.5 [6] , your information search is done and you can start writing. However, research is a recursive process. You don’t start at the beginning and continue straight through until you end at the end. Once you have followed this planning model, you will often find that you need to alter or refine your topic and start the process again, as seen here:

This revision process may happen at any time before or during the preparation of your paper or other final product. The researchers who are most successful do this, so don’t ignore opportunities to revise.

So let’s return to Sarah and her search for information to help her team’s project. Sarah realized she needed to make a number of changes in the search strategy she was using. She had several insights that definitely led her to some good sources of information for this particular research topic. Can you identify the good ideas she implemented?

This section contains material from:

Bernnard, Deborah, Greg Bobish, Jenna Hecker, Irina Holden, Allison Hosier, Trudi Jacobson, Tor Loney, and Daryl Bullis. The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , edited by Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson. Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014. http://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License .

• https://library.tamu.edu ↵
• “Concept Brainstorming,” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Blank Concept Brainstorming Worksheet,” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Completed Concept Brainstorming Worksheet” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵
• “Full Record Entry for a Book” is a reproduction from July 2019 of a Texas A&M University Libraries catalog entry from the Texas A&M University Libraries Quick Search. https://libcat.tamu.edu/vwebv/searchBasic. ↵
• “Planning Model” derived in 2019 from: Deborah Bernnard et al., The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook , eds. Greg Bobish and Trudi Jacobson (Geneseo, NY: Open SUNY Textbooks, Milne Library, 2014), https://textbooks.opensuny.org/the-information-literacy-users-guide-an-open-online-textbook/ . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . ↵

A statement, usually one sentence, that summarizes an argument that will later be explained, expanded upon, and developed in a longer essay or research paper. In undergraduate writing, a thesis statement is often found in the introductory paragraph of an essay. The plural of thesis is theses .

When something is described as scholarly, that means that has been written by and for the academic community. The term scholarly is commonly used as shorthand to indicate that information that has been peer reviewed  or examined by other experts of the same academic field or discipline. Sometimes, the terms academic, scholarly, and peer reviewed are confused as synonyms; peer reviewed is a narrower term referring to an item that has been reviewed by experts in the field prior to publication, while academic is a broader term that also includes works that are written by and for academics, but that have not been peer reviewed.

A library catalog is a database of records for the items a library holds and/or to which it has access. Searching a library catalog is not the same as searching the web, even though you may see a similar search box for both tools. Library catalog searches can return information that you would not find on the open web, and the searching process will likely take longer to refine.

A librarian who specializes in helping the public find information. In academic librarians, reference librarians often have subject specialties.

A database is an organized collection of data in a digital format. Library research databases are often composed of academic publications like journal articles and book chapters, although there are also specialty databases that have data like engineering specifications or world news articles.

An online software tool used to find information on the web. Many popular online search engines return query results by using algorithms to return probable desired information.

A short account or telling of an incident or story, either personal or historical; anecdotal evidence is frequently found in the form of a personal experience rather than objective data or widespread occurrence.

Query: to ask a question or make an inquiry, often with some amount of skepticism involved.

With relation to a database, a query is a call for results. Most times a query is a search term entered into a search box.

A full record for a library item is all of the bibliographic information entered into the catalog for that particular work. Common entries in a full record will include the name of the work, the author, the publisher, the place of publication, the number of pages, the format, subject terms, and sometimes chapter titles.

A form of returning back to or reoccurrence, usually as a procedure or practice that can be repeated.

7.3 Developing a Research Strategy Copyright © 2022 by Deborah Bernnard; Greg Bobish; Jenna Hecker; Irina Holden; Allison Hosier; Trudi Jacobson; Tor Loney; Daryl Bullis; and Sarah LeMire is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

University Library

Writing 2 (terhaar): science research projects.

• Introduction
• Step 1: An Inquiring Mind
• Step 2: Your Research Question
• Step 3: Your First Search
• Step 4: Refine Your Research Question
• Step 5: A Research Strategy
• Step 6: Read Your Sources
• Step 7: Give Credit
• Step 8: The Literature Review

Develop a Research Strategy and Find Sources

At this point in your research, there’s a tendency to start searching databases in any random manner that strikes your fancy, but this strategy usually proves to be ineffective, both in terms of time and effort. If you want to avoid wasting your time and effort, then you need to develop a productive research strategy. You need to plan how you will do your search. Your plan should include the types or kinds of sources, how you locate and access the sources, and the relevancy, significance, and/or importance of the sources. Part of your plan should include managing your sources using a Bibliography software tool (see tab on “giving credit where it’s due) for links to popular citation management tools.) 1) What types of sources do you need? The assignments will require you to first find primary sources. Primary sources are original, firsthand documents such as laboratory studies, field research reports, letters, diaries, eyewitness accounts, and legislative bills. Because primary sources are firsthand accounts, e.g. a scientist reports on the results of their work, they are thought to be more reliable than secondary sources. Articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are usually, but not always, primary sources. Your sources for your first assignments should be drawn from peer-reviewed scientific and/or scholarly sources. A peer-reviewed source is a source that has been been sent out for anonymous review by qualified scientists/scholars. Before having the article published, the author must correct any major problems highlighted by the anonymous reviewers. The assignments will then ask you to find secondary sources which may be drawn from a variety of sources including newspapers, popular magazines, government documents, etc. Secondary sources are secondhand sources offering commentary that may be subject to personal belief or opinion about primary sources. Because secondary sources may be subject to bias, they are thought to be less reliable than primary sources. But a primary source may not be more reliable than a secondary source, e.g. an individual firsthand report of an accident may not be a completely accurate report because the individual observed the incident from only one perspective. Thus, all sources must be evaluated for their accuracy and validity. When you read any source, especially a secondary source, be alert for any sign of bias. Read secondary sources with a critical eye as even reputable secondary sources, including major newspapers, may have editorial biases. You will be better placed to evaluate a secondary source if you read its primary sources, too. If the author of a secondary source refers to a particular study or report, then you should quickly read that particular report so that you can evaluate the accuracy of the secondary source. I recommend you start by searching the large, general scientific databases for peer-reviewed articles. (Note: some published material in scientific/scholarly journals is not peer-reviewed. For example, editorials and letters to the editor do not usually undergo peer-review. While this published material may be interesting, it most likely is classified as a secondary source, except for the letters!)  

Here's a link to all databases at  UCSC , all 390+ databases:  http://guides.library.ucsc.edu/az.php .  Try some of the more popular ones, such as Academic Search Complete,  Biosis  Previews, or  JSTOR  first. (Look through the alphabetical list to find the three I just named.) If these more popular ones don't turn up anything and you get stuck, see the subject guides listed here  http://guides.library.ucsc.edu/ .   Find the biology, environmental studies, health sciences, or ocean sciences databases. After you’ve exhausted the databases, you should think about particular journals that may not be listed in the databases. (Most of them will be listed in some database, but the databases in the library may not list really small or specialized journals, so search by journal type, too.) Some of the more popular journals are here: http://library.ucsc.edu/find/online-journals You can also search for journals by type here . Look under environmental sciences and life sciences. Did you find the listing for journals specializing in biodiversity? Ok, so now you’ve searched the databases and journals, but there are other online and print sources to search as well. Some of the small journals, perhaps specializing in research on the Arctic, can be located by searching by journal title. To look for specific journal titles (and don’t forget book titles) use Find Journals from Library Search.

The above link gets you into the UCSC McHenry library catalog or the all UC-campuses MELVYL catalog. Do not forget---you can always get a copy of an article or an entire book from the MELVYL catalog in 1-4 days via inter-library loan.  

I also like to visit the library with the call numbers for several books on my topic. I go to that section with those call numbers and then scan the surrounding shelves for other, possibly relevant, sources. I often turn up really good stuff this way! Need another way to find the literature on your species? Be on the lookout for what is known as a “review article,” which is nothing more than an article summarizing individual findings of many researchers in order to make broader conclusions about the state of scientific knowledge on an issue. You may not find one, but they are especially helpful if you do since someone else did some of your work for you!

And finally, don’t forget to read the list of references/Bibliography at the back of every journal article or book. If you discover an article that seems relevant, chances are the author of that article has already done some of your work for you---so find and read their sources, too! Ok, some final words of warning. You cannot reject a source because it says something you do not want to hear or because it goes against your tentative hypothesis. You must be fair and open-minded, so do not “cherry-pick” your sources. Additionally, as you work your way through the literature, you will need to make decisions about the relevancy, significance, and importance of each source. Look for clues that will help you evaluate a source: its credibility (who is the publisher, who is the author), when was it published, who is the audience, why was it published, how accurate is the source, and is the source cited (cross-referenced) by other sources? Now you see why you need to develop a plan for how to proceed with your research! Figure out an organizational strategy that works for you, then keep accurate and precise records of where and how you search. 2) Accessing your sources OK, so now you’ve found some sources, but you’re having trouble finding the full text of the article. You need to learn how to access your sources. Take a look at the video below to find out this information.

• << Previous: Step 4: Refine Your Research Question
• Next: Step 6: Read Your Sources >>

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License except where otherwise noted.

Land Acknowledgement

The land on which we gather is the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma.

The land acknowledgement used at UC Santa Cruz was developed in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band Chairman and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program at the UCSC Arboretum .

Kreitzberg Library for CGCS Students

Get started with research, what is a research strategy.

• Developing Your Research Topic
• Creating Keywords
• Constructing an Effective Search
• Refining or Broadening Your Search Results

• What is a Research Strategy Video Transcript PDF Transcript of the video, What is a Research Strategy?
• Next: Developing Your Research Topic >>
• Last Updated: Dec 22, 2022 2:32 PM
• URL: https://guides.norwich.edu/online/howtostart

•   LibGuides
•   A-Z List
•   Help

The Research Process: Step By Step

• Step 1: Getting Started

research TIPS!

Need more help, where to start, step 1: finding research by source type, step 2: searching the databases.

• step 3: refine your results
• Step 4: Evaluating your sources
• Scholarly vs. Popular Sources
• Step 5: Put it Together & Cite it
• Library Workshops
• MicroCredential: Fundamentals of Information Literacy This link opens in a new window

• Build on that basic information by researching your topic across other formats and resources like books, periodicals, databases, etc.
• As you continue to search narrow down our topic to make it more manageable and specific, use the tools built-in to the databases and other resources to help guide you, such as subject headings, tags, related searches, etc.
• Ask for help!

We're here to help! 

Librarians are here to provide research help to students, faculty, staff, and community members.

I have the topic, but I'm not sure how to approach researching it... Is the Internet the best choice for my research...?

You don't need to be an expert on a topic to do a report about it.

A good place to start (especially if you don't know much about your topic), is the Library Catalog to help you find books that give you general information. Encyclopedias are good for concise explanations and contextual data. A librarian can recommend the best encyclopedias or other reference materials you may want to use.

Build on your basic information and skills. Avail yourself to information in all formats : Books (on the shelves and online); Periodicals (journal, magazine, newspaper articles both on the shelves and through databases ); Digital media (videos, CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc.); and even some Internet sites.

Your professor will tell you whether you are allowed to use Web sites as resources. Most people can surf the Internet and find topical information but cannot determine if what they've found is accurate, objective or up-to-date. 

For assistance on developing the most efficient research strategy and identification of local resources, contact a reference librarian at the library or via Ask Us .

• General Databases
• Popular Issues

• Google Scholar Search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Don't forget to choose FIU in your Library links.

• Google News Search & Archive Aggregated headlines and a search engine of many of the world's news sources including country, state, and local newspapers.
• All Newspaper Databases
• Search Strategy
• Database Features
• Boolean Operators

Create a Search Strategy

Combine your keywords/search terms with Boolean operators

• OR (synonyms: any of these words)
• AND (restrict: all these words)

Break your research topic into keywords.

• Many databases use specific terms to label documents, use these "official" database terms from the results that work for you
• Try the thesaurus or subject headings

Use parentheses with your terms and Boolean operators to create your search phrase

• exp. (cat OR kitten) AND (wild OR feral OR homeless)
• exp. publication year, document type, or Peer Reviewed
• Use this for an exact quote, phrase or order of the search term. exp. "latin america"
• The asterisk will be replaced by any applicable letters
• This is called truncation
• You can use asterisks as a shortcut for OR-ing words that have identical roots
• For example, paint* will search for paint, painting, painters, painterly, etc.

Each database may have different features that will expedite your searches.

Look at links and/or icons for these functions:

• In some you can create a free account to save citations, searches, or research for later review.
• Use the built-in citation generators
• You can often e-mail citations or the full-text to yourself or a colleague.
• See if the database allows you to export a citation directly into RefWorks or another bibliographic management program.

Use Boolean operators (the words AND, OR, and NOT) to combine your search terms.

• Use AND when you want to include all of two or more terms together in the same search – use with independent concepts. AND will limit your results with each additional term.
• Use OR when you want to include any of two or more terms in a search – use with related concepts. OR will expand your results with each additional term.
• Use NOT when you want to exclude a term from your search. NOT will limit your results and is useful to avoid retrieving irrelevant items, but use NOT with caution! By excluding an item that briefly mentions the unwanted term, you might be excluding an otherwise useful resource.

You can use as many Boolean operators as you like in a search phrase, but include related concepts in parentheses to keep the phrase organized (this is called nesting). For example:

Dog OR Canine AND Bark NOT Tree: Messy

(Dog OR Canine) AND (Bark NOT Tree): Clear

For more information and practice exercises, see the Boolean searching guide by the Colorado State University Libraries .

Boolean Operators: Pirates vs. Ninjas

An introduction to the basics of Boolean operators. Created to support information literacy instruction at  Lincoln Memorial University's Carnegie-Vincent Library .

• << Previous: Step 1: Getting Started
• Next: step 3: refine your results >>
• Last Updated: May 28, 2024 10:38 PM
• URL: https://library.fiu.edu/gettingstarted

Information

Fiu libraries floorplans, green library, modesto a. maidique campus, hubert library, biscayne bay campus.

Directions: Green Library, MMC

Directions: Hubert Library, BBC

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

6.1: How Can I Create a Research Strategy?

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 119872

\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)

\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)

\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)

\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)

Research Questions

Many students want to start searching using a broad topic or even their specific thesis statement. If you start with too broad of a topic, your search results list will overwhelm you. Imagine having to sort through thousands of sources to try to find ones to use in your paper. That’s what happens when your topic is too broad; your information will also be too broad. Starting with your thesis statement usually means you have already formed an opinion about the topic. What happens if the research doesn’t agree with your thesis? Instead of closing yourself off to one side of the story, it’s better to develop a research question that you would like the research to help you answer about your topic.

Steps for Developing a Research Question

The steps for developing a research question, listed below, help you organize your thoughts.

Step 1: Pick a topic (or consider the one assigned to you).

Step 2: Write a narrower/smaller topic that is related to the first.

Step 3: List some potential questions that could logically be asked in relation to the narrow topic.

Step 4: Pick the question in which you are most interested.

Step 5: Modify that question as needed so that it is more focused.

Here’s an example:

Keywords and Search Terms

Starting with a research question helps you figure out precisely what you’re looking for. Next, you’ll need the most effective set of search terms – starting from main concepts and then identifying related terms. These keywords will become your search terms, and you’ll use them in library databases to find sources.

Identify the keywords in your research question by selecting nouns important to the meaning of your question and leaving out words that don’t help the search, such as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and, usually, verbs. Nouns that you would use to tag your research question so you could find it later are likely to be its main concepts.

Example: How are birds affected by wind turbines?

The keywords are birds and wind turbines . Avoid terms like affect and effect as search terms, even when you’re looking for studies that report effects or effectiveness.These terms are common and contain many synonyms, so including them as search terms can limit your results.

Example: What lesson plans are available for teaching fractions?

The keywords are lesson plans and fractions . Stick to what’s necessary. For instance, don’t include: children—nothing in the research question suggests the lesson plans are for children; teaching—teaching isn’t necessary because lesson plans imply teaching; available—available is not necessary.

Keywords can improve your searching in all different kinds of databases and search engines. Try using keywords instead of entire sentences when you search Google and see how your search results improve.

For each keyword, list alternative terms, including synonyms, singular and plural forms of the words, and words that have other associations with the main concept. Sometimes synonyms, plurals, and singulars aren’t enough. Also consider associations with other words and concepts. For instance, it might help, when looking for information on the common cold, to include the term virus—because a type of virus causes the common cold.

Here’s an example of keywords and synonyms for our previous research question arranged in a graphic organizer called a Word Cloud:

Once you have keywords and alternate terms, you are prepared to start searching for sources in library search engines called databases .

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• It’s a good idea to begin the research process with a question you’d like to answer, instead of a broad topic or a thesis statement.
• Creating a research strategy and finding keywords and alternate terms for your topic can help you locate sources more effectively.
• Creating a Word Cloud to organize your thoughts makes searching for sources faster and easier.

• The Open University
• Guest user / Sign out
• Study with The Open University

My OpenLearn Profile

Personalise your OpenLearn profile, save your favourite content and get recognition for your learning

About this free course

Become an ou student, download this course, share this free course.

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

6 Research strategy

A research strategy introduces the main components of a research project such as the research topic area and focus, the research perspective (see Sections 1 and 2), the research design, and the research methods (these are discussed below). It refers to how you propose to answer the research questions set and how you will implement the methodology.

In the first part of this course, you started to identify your research topic, to develop your research statement and you thought about possible research question(s). While you might already have clear research questions or objectives, it is possible that, at this stage, you are uncertain about the most appropriate strategy to implement in order to address those questions. This section looks briefly at a few research strategies you are likely to adopt.

Figure 5 shows the four main types of research strategy: case study, qualitative interviews, quantitative survey and action-oriented research. It is likely that you will use one of the first three; you are less likely to use action-oriented research.

Here is what each of these strategies entails:

• Case Study : This focuses on an in-depth investigation of a single case (e.g. one organisation) or a small number of cases. In case study research generally, information is sought from different sources and through the use of different types of data such as observations, survey, interviews and analysis of documents. Data can be qualitative, quantitative or a mix of both. Case study research allows a composite and multifaceted investigation of the issue or problem.
• Qualitative interviews : There are different types of qualitative interviews (e.g. structured, semi-structured, unstructured) and this is the most widely used method for gathering data. Interviews allow access to rich information. They require extensive planning concerning the development of the structure, decisions about who to interview and how, whether to conduct individual or group interviews, and how to record and analyse them. Interviewees need a wide range of skills, including good social skills, listening skills and communication skills. Interviews are also time-consuming to conduct and they are prone to problems and biases that need to be minimised during the design stage.
• Quantitative survey : This is a widely used method in business research and allows access to significantly high numbers of participants. The availability of online sites enables the wide and cheap distribution of surveys and the organisation of the responses. Although the development of questions may appear easy, to develop a meaningful questionnaire that allows the answering of research questions is difficult. Questionnaires need to appeal to respondents, cannot be too long, too intrusive or too difficult to understand. They also need to measure accurately the issue under investigation. For these reasons it is also advisable, when possible, to use questionnaires that are available on the market and have already been thoroughly validated. This is highly recommended for projects such as the one you need to carry out for this course. When using questionnaires decisions have to be made about the size of the sample and whether and when this is representative of the whole population studied. Surveys can be administered to the whole population (census), for example to all employees of a specific organisation.
• Action-oriented research : This refers to practical business research which is directed towards a change or the production of recommendations for change. Action-oriented research is a participatory process which brings together theory and practice, action and reflection. The project is often carried out by insiders. This is because it is grounded in the need to actively involve participants in order for them to develop ownership of the project. After the project, participants will have to implement the change.

Action-oriented research is not exactly action research, even though they are both grounded in the same assumptions (e.g. to produce change). Action research is a highly complex approach to research, reflection and change which is not always achievable in practice (Cameron and Price, 2009). Furthermore action researchers have to be highly skilled and it is unlikely that for this specific project you will be involved in action research. For these reasons this overview focuses on the less pure action-oriented research strategy. If you are interested in exploring this strategy and action research further, you might want to read Chapter 14 of Cameron and Price (2009).

It is possible for you to choose a strategy that includes the use of secondary data. Secondary data is data that has been collected by other people (e.g. employee surveys, market research data, census). Using secondary data for your research project needs to be justified in that it meets the requirements of the research questions. The use of secondary data has obvious benefits in terms of saving money and time. However, it is important to ascertain the quality of the data and how it was collected; for example, data collected by government agencies would be good quality but it may not necessary meet the needs of your project.

It is important to note that there should be consistency between the perspective (subjective or objective) and the methodology employed. This means that the type of strategy adopted needs to be coherent and that its various elements need to fit in with each other, whether the research is grounded on primary or secondary data.

Now watch this video clip in which Dr Rebecca Hewett, Prof Mark Saunders, Prof Gillian Symon and Prof David Guest discuss the importance of setting the right research question, what strategy they adopted to come up with specific research questions for their projects, and how they refined these initial research questions to focus their research.

Make notes on how you might apply some of these strategies to develop your own research question.

There is no feedback on this activity.

Developing a Research Strategy: Where to Start & When to Stop

Clarify the assignment, begin with a secondary source, move to primary sources, consult a variety of sources, use keycite or shepard's to check status of law and update your research, online searching: lexis & westlaw.

• Starting Places for Research
• When to Stop Your Research

Director of the Law Library & Assistant Professor of Law

Before you start researching, make sure that you understand what your supervisor wants you to do.  Don't be afraid to ask questions -- both when you first receive your assignment and later on when you need clarification about the assignment.

Ellen Callinan, Senior Consultant with Axelroth & Associates and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law School, has devised the following JUST ASK formula to help new attorneys remember what to ask when they receive assignments:

J – Jurisdiction:   Which government entities have jurisdiction over this topic? Which jurisdictions do I need to research: federal, state, or local law? U – Useful tips:   Ask your supervisor for some tips on good starting places. Are there any internal resources, such as other attorneys, briefs or research memos, that might help? Are there any recent cases, statutes or other developments? S – Scope of research:   What scope of research is appropriate? Does the attorney want an outline or overview, or are you expected to do exhaustive research and produce a detailed research memo? T – Terms of art:  What terms of art pertain to this issue? What are their definitions? A – Acronyms:  What acronyms, such as HIPAA, OSHA, or ADA, are associated with this issue? What do they mean? S – Sources:   What secondary sources (treatises, practice guides, etc.) are usually used to research this area of law? What are the most useful publications? K – Key cost restraints:  What cost restraints apply to this assignment? How much time can be spent or billed? Will online research be allowed?

Secondary sources are materials that explain and analyze the law in a particular area.  When you're starting a research project and you're unfamiliar with an area of law, try starting with a more basic secondary source, like a "Nutshell" or a legal encyclopedia (such as California Jurisprudence or American Jurisprudence ), so that you can learn the basic structure, theoretical underpinnings, and terminology of your area.

When you're more familiar with your topic, you can move to a more detailed secondary source, such as a practice guide or treatise, for deeper analysis of key cases, statutes, regulations, and other primary sources.

If you are already familiar with the area that you will be researching, you will most likely want to turn to a very detailed secondary source, such as a large looseleaf service.  An example of a looseleaf service is CCH's Standard Federal Tax Reporter .

You can find more suggestions for good starting places under the next tab in this research guide, Starting Places for Legal Research .

And remember - you may need to return to secondary sources later in your research if you find that you need to explore additional topics or learn about another area of the law.

• Tips for Finding Secondary Sources / Starting Places for Legal Research Tips and links to help you find helpful secondary sources of all types.

When you have a basic grasp of the area of law and your specific issue, you should begin to review primary sources. Look up key statutes as soon as you find citations. Use the annotations / "notes of decisions" to locate cases. Look up potentially dispositive cases at the outset, too. Review case headnotes for leads for later digest searching and cite checking.

Your research should include a variety of sources:

• Annotated statutes, to find summaries of cases that discuss or analyze any relevant statutes.
• Digests, to find other cases similar to those you've already found.
• Online case law (using terms & connectors or natural language searching).
• American Law Reports (ALR) annotations, to find citations to primary authorities about specific legal issues from all United States jurisdictions.
• Law review articles, to find detailed overviews of the law and to review the author's citations to find more authority on your topic.
• Other looseleaf services, practice guides, or treatises that you haven't reviewed yet.

You should always use KeyCite or Shepard's to check to see if the primary authority that you've located is still good law.  You can also use KeyCite and Shepard's to find additional primary or secondary sources. Both Lexis and Westlaw allow you to set up alerts that will email new citations to your sources whenever additional citing references are added to KeyCite or Shepard's. The librarians can help you set up these alerts.

It's best to search Lexis and Westlaw after you've obtained some basic background information on your issue and you feel that you've defined your research issue thoroughly.

Keep these tips in mind:

• Consider starting with a secondary source on Lexis and Westlaw if you haven't consulted a secondary source yet.
• Consult a librarian or the vendors' reference attorneys (vendor help is available 24/7) for advice on creating searches (Lexis attorneys are available at 1-800-45-LEXIS, Bloomberg Law help is available at 888-560-2529, and Westlaw attorneys are available at 1-800-REF-ATTY).
• Next: Starting Places for Research >>
• Last Updated: Aug 17, 2023 9:18 AM
• URL: https://legalresearch.usfca.edu/ResearchStrategies
• Web Feedback
• Contact USF

• SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
• COVID-19 Library Updates
• Make Appointment

Research 101 (A How-to Guide): Step 3. Create a search strategy

• Step 1. Choose a topic
• Step 2. Get background information
• Step 3. Create a search strategy
• Step 4. Find books and e-books
• Step 5. Find articles
• Step 6. Evaluate your sources
• Step 7. Cite your sources

Step 3. Create a Search Strategy

After you've selected your topic, come up with a research question, and done some background reading, you'll need to create a search strategy to find books and articles in databases.  Database searching is different from searching Google - databases cannot interpret questions and phrases.  It's necessary to build a search strategy to get the best results quickly.

1. Identify main concepts

Take your research question and pull out the main concepts.  For the research question, Should college athletes be paid? , the main concepts are college athletes and paid .

2. List search terms

Next, list the terms you'll use for searching.  For each main concept, come up with synonyms and related terms, both narrower and broader.  ( Hint: your mind map might come in handy here. )  Here are some search terms for the key concepts above.

3. Combine search terms with AND and OR

AND finds items containing both (or more) terms, narrowing your search. Use AND to combine your main concepts.

college AND athletes AND pay

OR finds items containing either term, broadening your search. Use OR to combine synonyms or related terms.

college OR university

If using both AND and OR, use ( ) to set apart concepts, like a math equation.

(college OR university) AND athletes AND (pay OR compensation)

When using your search strategy to look for books and articles in databases,

• Experiment and try several searches with different search terms.
• Scan your results for "subjects" to find other search terms to use.
• Use fewer search terms if you're not getting enough results.

• << Previous: Step 2. Get background information
• Next: Step 4. Find books and e-books >>
• Last Updated: May 28, 2024 8:42 AM
• URL: https://libguides.depaul.edu/research101

Send us an email

How to do market research: The complete guide for your brand

Written by by Jacqueline Zote

Published on  April 13, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

Blindly putting out content or products and hoping for the best is a thing of the past. Not only is it a waste of time and energy, but you’re wasting valuable marketing dollars in the process. Now you have a wealth of tools and data at your disposal, allowing you to develop data-driven marketing strategies . That’s where market research comes in, allowing you to uncover valuable insights to inform your business decisions.

Conducting market research not only helps you better understand how to sell to customers but also stand out from your competition. In this guide, we break down everything you need to know about market research and how doing your homework can help you grow your business.

Table of contents:

What is market research?

Why is market research important, types of market research, where to conduct market research.

• Steps for conducting market research
• Tools to use for market research

Market research is the process of gathering information surrounding your business opportunities. It identifies key information to better understand your audience. This includes insights related to customer personas and even trends shaping your industry.

Taking time out of your schedule to conduct research is crucial for your brand health. Here are some of the key benefits of market research:

Understand your customers’ motivations and pain points

Most marketers are out of touch with what their customers want. Moreover, these marketers are missing key information on what products their audience wants to buy.

Simply put, you can’t run a business if you don’t know what motivates your customers.

And spoiler alert: Your customers’ wants and needs change. Your customers’ behaviors today might be night and day from what they were a few years ago.

Market research holds the key to understanding your customers better. It helps you uncover their key pain points and motivations and understand how they shape their interests and behavior.

Figure out how to position your brand

Positioning is becoming increasingly important as more and more brands enter the marketplace. Market research enables you to spot opportunities to define yourself against your competitors.

Maybe you’re able to emphasize a lower price point. Perhaps your product has a feature that’s one of a kind. Finding those opportunities goes hand in hand with researching your market.

Maintain a strong pulse on your industry at large

Today’s marketing world evolves at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with.

Fresh products. Up-and-coming brands. New marketing tools. Consumers get bombarded with sales messages from all angles. This can be confusing and overwhelming.

By monitoring market trends, you can figure out the best tactics for reaching your target audience.

Not everyone conducts market research for the same reason. While some may want to understand their audience better, others may want to see how their competitors are doing. As such, there are different types of market research you can conduct depending on your goal.

Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions. This helps the conversation to flow naturally, making it easier to add context. Whether this takes place in person or virtually, it enables you to gather more in-depth qualitative data.

Buyer persona research

Buyer persona research lets you take a closer look at the people who make up your target audience. You can discover the needs, challenges and pain points of each buyer persona to understand what they need from your business. This will then allow you to craft products or campaigns to resonate better with each persona.

Pricing research

In this type of research, brands compare similar products or services with a particular focus on pricing. They look at how much those products or services typically sell for so they can get more competitive with their pricing strategy.

Competitive analysis research

Competitor analysis gives you a realistic understanding of where you stand in the market and how your competitors are doing. You can use this analysis to find out what’s working in your industry and which competitors to watch out for. It even gives you an idea of how well those competitors are meeting consumer needs.

Depending on the competitor analysis tool you use, you can get as granular as you need with your research. For instance, Sprout Social lets you analyze your competitors’ social strategies. You can see what types of content they’re posting and even benchmark your growth against theirs.

Brand awareness research

Conducting brand awareness research allows you to assess your brand’s standing in the market. It tells you how well-known your brand is among your target audience and what they associate with it. This can help you gauge people’s sentiments toward your brand and whether you need to rebrand or reposition.

If you don’t know where to start with your research, you’re in the right place.

There’s no shortage of market research methods out there. In this section, we’ve highlighted research channels for small and big businesses alike.

Considering that Google sees a staggering 8.5 billion searches each day, there’s perhaps no better place to start.

A quick Google search is a potential goldmine for all sorts of questions to kick off your market research. Who’s ranking for keywords related to your industry? Which products and pieces of content are the hottest right now? Who’s running ads related to your business?

For example, Google Product Listing Ads can help highlight all of the above for B2C brands.

The same applies to B2B brands looking to keep tabs on who’s running industry-related ads and ranking for keyword terms too.

There’s no denying that email represents both an aggressive and effective marketing channel for marketers today. Case in point, 44% of online shoppers consider email as the most influential channel in their buying decisions.

Looking through industry and competitor emails is a brilliant way to learn more about your market. For example, what types of offers and deals are your competitors running? How often are they sending emails?

Email is also invaluable for gathering information directly from your customers. This survey message from Asana is a great example of how to pick your customers’ brains to figure out how you can improve your quality of service.

Industry journals, reports and blogs

Don’t neglect the importance of big-picture market research when it comes to tactics and marketing channels to explore. Look to marketing resources such as reports and blogs as well as industry journals

Keeping your ear to the ground on new trends and technologies is a smart move for any business. Sites such as Statista, Marketing Charts, AdWeek and Emarketer are treasure troves of up-to-date data and news for marketers.

And of course, there’s the  Sprout Insights blog . And invaluable resources like The Sprout Social Index™  can keep you updated on the latest social trends.

Social media

If you want to learn more about your target market, look no further than social media. Social offers a place to discover what your customers want to see in future products or which brands are killin’ it. In fact, social media is become more important for businesses than ever with the level of data available.

It represents a massive repository of real-time data and insights that are instantly accessible. Brand monitoring and social listening are effective ways to conduct social media research . You can even be more direct with your approach. Ask questions directly or even poll your audience to understand their needs and preferences.

The 5 steps for how to do market research

Now that we’ve covered the why and where, it’s time to get into the practical aspects of market research. Here are five essential steps on how to do market research effectively.

Step 1: Identify your research topic

First off, what are you researching about? What do you want to find out? Narrow down on a specific research topic so you can start with a clear idea of what to look for.

For example, you may want to learn more about how well your product features are satisfying the needs of existing users. This might potentially lead to feature updates and improvements. Or it might even result in new feature introductions.

Similarly, your research topic may be related to your product or service launch or customer experience. Or you may want to conduct research for an upcoming marketing campaign.

Step 2: Choose a buyer persona to engage

If you’re planning to focus your research on a specific type of audience, decide which buyer persona you want to engage. This persona group will serve as a representative sample of your target audience.

Engaging a specific group of audience lets you streamline your research efforts. As such, it can be a much more effective and organized approach than researching thousands (if not millions) of individuals.

You may be directing your research toward existing users of your product. To get even more granular, you may want to focus on users who have been familiar with the product for at least a year, for example.

Step 3: Start collecting data

The next step is one of the most critical as it involves collecting the data you need for your research. Before you begin, make sure you’ve chosen the right research methods that will uncover the type of data you need. This largely depends on your research topic and goals.

Remember that you don’t necessarily have to stick to one research method. You may use a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. So for example, you could use interviews to supplement the data from your surveys. Or you may stick to insights from your social listening efforts.

To keep things consistent, let’s look at this in the context of the example from earlier. Perhaps you can send out a survey to your existing users asking them a bunch of questions. This might include questions like which features they use the most and how often they use them. You can get them to choose an answer from one to five and collect quantitative data.

Plus, for qualitative insights, you could even include a few open-ended questions with the option to write their answers. For instance, you might ask them if there’s any improvement they wish to see in your product.

Step 4: Analyze results

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to analyze it keeping your research topic in mind. This involves trying to interpret the data to look for a wider meaning, particularly in relation to your research goal.

So let’s say a large percentage of responses were four or five in the satisfaction rating. This means your existing users are mostly satisfied with your current product features. On the other hand, if the responses were mostly ones and twos, you may look for opportunities to improve. The responses to your open-ended questions can give you further context as to why people are disappointed.

Step 5: Make decisions for your business

Now it’s time to take your findings and turn them into actionable insights for your business. In this final step, you need to decide how you want to move forward with your new market insight.

What did you find in your research that would require action? How can you put those findings to good use?

The market research tools you should be using

To wrap things up, let’s talk about the various tools available to conduct speedy, in-depth market research. These tools are essential for conducting market research faster and more efficiently.

Social listening and analytics

Social analytics tools like Sprout can help you keep track of engagement across social media. This goes beyond your own engagement data but also includes that of your competitors. Considering how quickly social media moves, using a third-party analytics tool is ideal. It allows you to make sense of your social data at a glance and ensure that you’re never missing out on important trends.

Email marketing research tools

Keeping track of brand emails is a good idea for any brand looking to stand out in its audience’s inbox.

Tools such as MailCharts ,  Really Good Emails  and  Milled  can show you how different brands run their email campaigns.

Meanwhile, tools like  Owletter  allow you to monitor metrics such as frequency and send-timing. These metrics can help you understand email marketing strategies among competing brands.

Content marketing research

If you’re looking to conduct research on content marketing, tools such as  BuzzSumo  can be of great help. This tool shows you the top-performing industry content based on keywords. Here you can see relevant industry sites and influencers as well as which brands in your industry are scoring the most buzz. It shows you exactly which pieces of content are ranking well in terms of engagements and shares and on which social networks.

SEO and keyword tracking

Monitoring industry keywords is a great way to uncover competitors. It can also help you discover opportunities to advertise your products via organic search. Tools such as  Ahrefs  provide a comprehensive keyword report to help you see how your search efforts stack up against the competition.

Competitor comparison template

For the sake of organizing your market research, consider creating a competitive matrix. The idea is to highlight how you stack up side-by-side against others in your market. Use a  social media competitive analysis template  to track your competitors’ social presence. That way, you can easily compare tactics, messaging and performance. Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses next to your competitors, you’ll find opportunities as well.

Customer persona creator

Finally, customer personas represent a place where all of your market research comes together. You’d need to create a profile of your ideal customer that you can easily refer to. Tools like  Xtensio  can help in outlining your customer motivations and demographics as you zero in on your target market.

Build a solid market research strategy

Having a deeper understanding of the market gives you leverage in a sea of competitors. Use the steps and market research tools we shared above to build an effective market research strategy.

But keep in mind that the accuracy of your research findings depends on the quality of data collected. Turn to Sprout’s social media analytics tools to uncover heaps of high-quality data across social networks.

• Marketing Disciplines
• Team Collaboration

How to build a marketing tech stack that scales your business

• Customer Experience

Brand trust: What it is and why it matters

• Leveling Up

The 43 best marketing resources we recommend in 2024

Executing a successful demand generation strategy [with examples]

• Now on slide

Build and grow stronger relationships on social

Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with the only all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.

Salesforce is closed for new business in your area.

Research Strategies and Methods

• First Online: 22 July 2021

Cite this chapter

• Paul Johannesson 3 &
• Erik Perjons 3  

Researchers have since centuries used research methods to support the creation of reliable knowledge based on empirical evidence and logical arguments. This chapter offers an overview of established research strategies and methods with a focus on empirical research in the social sciences. We discuss research strategies, such as experiment, survey, case study, ethnography, grounded theory, action research, and phenomenology. Research methods for data collection are also described, including questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, observations, and documents. Qualitative and quantitative methods for data analysis are discussed. Finally, the use of research strategies and methods within design science is investigated.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Bhattacherjee A (2012) Social science research: principles, methods, and practices, 2 edn. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Tampa, FL

Google Scholar  

Blake W (2012) Delphi complete works of William Blake, 2nd edn. Delphi Classics

Bradburn NM, Sudman S, Wansink B (2004) Asking questions: the definitive guide to questionnaire design – for market research, political polls, and social and health questionnaires, revised edition. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

Bryman A (2016) Social research methods, 5th edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Charmaz K (2014) Constructing grounded theory, 2nd edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Coghlan D (2019) Doing action research in your own organization, 5th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Creswell JW, Creswell JD (2017) Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, 5th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

MATH   Google Scholar  

Denscombe M (2017) The good research guide, 6th edn. Open University Press, London

Dey I (2003) Qualitative data analysis: a user friendly guide for social scientists. Routledge, London

Book   Google Scholar  

Fairclough N (2013) Critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language, 2 edn. Routledge, London

Field A, Hole GJ (2003) How to design and report experiments, 1st edn. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Fowler FJ (2013) Survey research methods, 5th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Glaser B, Strauss A (1999) The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research. Routledge, London

Kemmis S, McTaggart R, Nixon R (2016) The action research planner: doing critical participatory action research, 1st edn. Springer, Berlin

Krippendorff K (2018) Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology, 4th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

LeCompte MD, Schensul JJ (2010) Designing and conducting ethnographic research: an introduction, 2nd edn. AltaMira Press, Lanham, MD

McNiff J (2013) Action research: principles and practice, 3rd edn. Routledge, London

Oates BJ (2006) Researching information systems and computing. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Peterson RA (2000) Constructing effective questionnaires. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks

Prior L (2008) Repositioning documents in social research. Sociology 42(5):821–836

Article   Google Scholar  

Seidman I (2019) Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences, 5th edn. Teachers College Press, New York

Silverman D (2018) Doing qualitative research, 5th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Stephens L (2004) Advanced statistics demystified, 1st edn. McGraw-Hill Professional, New York

Urdan TC (2016) Statistics in plain English, 4th ed. Routledge, London

Yin RK (2017) Case study research and applications: design and methods, 6th edn. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

Paul Johannesson & Erik Perjons

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Johannesson, P., Perjons, E. (2021). Research Strategies and Methods. In: An Introduction to Design Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78132-3_3

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78132-3_3

Published : 22 July 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-78131-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-78132-3

eBook Packages : Computer Science Computer Science (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

You Need New Skills to Make a Career Pivot. Here’s How to Find the Time to Build Them.

• Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Even when you have a full-time job.

With any significant change in your career comes the need for new skills. But that’s even more true when you want a radical career change. In these situations, it’s going to take more than listening to a few webinars to build the knowledge you need get to where you want to go. You must set aside a significant amount of time for self-directed learning, formal training, or even a second job to gain the skills for the big leap.

There are a few strategies to be effective for consistently making time for acquiring new career skills. First, accept the time commitment; you may need to scale back on nonessential activities. Second, research what’s required for your new field, whether it’s formal licensing, independent working, or side hustle work. Third, layer in learning onto activities you’re already doing throughout your day. Fourth, designate specific times you’ll dedicate to skill-building — and stick to it. Finally, modify your work schedule, if needed.

Sometimes you don’t just want a new job, you want a radical career change . Perhaps you’ve been in finance and now want to be an acupuncturist, you’re a marketer eager to lead a startup, or you’re an educator looking to shift into catering and event planning.

• ES Elizabeth Grace Saunders is a time management coach and the founder of Real Life E Time Coaching & Speaking . She is the author of How to Invest Your Time Like Money and Divine Time Management . Find out more at RealLifeE.com .

Partner Center

The secrets of outperforming family-owned businesses: How they create value—and how you can become one

These days, organizations across industries and geographies are doing everything they can to bounce forward from recent economic, geopolitical, and technological disruptions.

For them, resilience may be a relatively new concept.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Eduardo Asaf, Igor Carvalho, Acha Leke , Francesco Malatesta, and Jose Tellechea, representing views from McKinsey’s Private Equity & Principal Investor’s Practice and its Family-Owned Business Special Initiative.

For family-owned businesses (FOBs)—companies in which founders or descendants hold significant share capital or voting rights—it’s just business as usual. 1 Refers to companies in which the family controls at least 20 percent of owned capital share or voting rights; note that voting rights may be controlling or noncontrolling. Regardless of what the world throws at them, many of these companies have survived and thrived over multiple decades. Some, such as Levi Strauss and L’Óreal, have been operating for well over a century.

FOBs have long played an outsize role in the global economy—a role that often goes unnoticed or underestimated. They account for more than 70 percent of global GDP, and they generate turnover of between $60 trillion and $70 trillion annually. They are responsible for about 60 percent of global employment, and they play a critical role in supporting education, healthcare, and infrastructure development across their communities around the world. 2 "Empowering family businesses to fast-track sustainable development,” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, April 13, 2021.

McKinsey’s own recent research confirms FOBs’ adaptability, resilience, and impact: they have the structures and best practices required to withstand business challenges in uncertain times. And in general, they exhibit stronger performance than businesses that are not family owned, although the extent and drivers of that outperformance vary (Exhibit 1).

To understand FOBs’ history of outperformance and how the best among them create value and impact, we analyzed 600 publicly listed FOBs, compared their performance with that of 600 publicly listed companies that are not family owned, and surveyed another 600 primarily private FOBs around the world. Additionally, we interviewed leaders of more than 20 FOBs globally.

The findings were surprising.

For instance, while it has been widely known that FOBs deliver higher total shareholder returns (TSR) compared with non-FOBs, the root causes of this outperformance have been less well-known—until now. Our analysis shows that the higher TSR results from better underlying operational performance by FOBs, as compared with non-FOBs. The research also demonstrates how the performance and value creation strategies of FOBs shift as these businesses get bigger and older.

The data tell a compelling story of outcomes and impact, but they also begin to reveal what the highest-performing FOBs are doing differently when compared with peers, in two areas: mindsets and strategic actions.

They demonstrate four mindsets that are common to all FOBs but that take on outsize importance within the high performers, allowing them to gain and sustain a competitive advantage. The critical mindsets are a focus on purpose beyond profits, a long-term view and emphasis on reinvesting in the business, a conservative and cautious stance on finances, and processes that allow for efficient decision making.

The high-performing FOBs then combine these mindsets with five strategic actions in ways that others do not. Specifically, they actively diversify their portfolios, and they dynamically reallocate resources to the most promising businesses, regions, and channels. They are both efficient investors and operators. They maintain a relentless focus on attracting, developing, and retaining talent, and they continually review their governance mechanisms to ensure strong business performance across generations.

We’ll unpack this “4+5” formula further in this article. It’s important to note that the formula and the lessons it imparts are applicable to both FOBs and non-FOBs alike—and our research suggests that deploying it effectively can pay off over the long term. When we applied the formula to the family-owned companies in our research base, we estimated that it could create a 2.5- to 5.5-times increase in economic profit for them.

Indeed, FOBs around the world that successfully follow this formula have an opportunity to quadruple their value over the next five to ten years—bolstering their market performance, sharpening the resilience edge that has allowed them to keep the lights on for generations, and making an even greater impact across their communities.

FOB outperformance by the numbers

Our research shows that FOBs have created more value and impact than non-FOBs over the past decade—a dynamic that has largely held true regardless of which metrics we used to assess companies’ performance and despite the unique challenges FOBs face (see sidebar, “Unique challenges on the road to outperformance”). 3 Non-FOBs are defined as any company that does not meet a 20 percent threshold for family ownership in either share capital or voting rights.

Between 2017 and 2022, FOBs posted an average TSR of 2.6 percent, compared with 2.3 percent for non-FOBs. In that same five-year period, FOBs achieved average economic profit of $77.5 million, surpassing the non-FOBs average economic profit of $66.3 million. 4 Economic profit is the difference between revenue received from the sale of goods and services and the costs of producing those goods and services, including opportunity costs. FOBs also generated (on average) an economic spread that was 33 percent higher than that of non-FOBs in the same period. 5 Economic spread is the difference between a company’s return on invested capital and its weighted average cost of capital.

Unique challenges on the road to outperformance

It’s important to acknowledge the unique challenges that all family-owned businesses (FOBs) face—all the better to appreciate how the very highest-performing FOBs in our research base have managed to ascend.

A cautious approach to finances is a trademark of FOBs that helps them weather economic shocks, although it can also delay their recovery. An aversion to taking on debt, for example, might constrain an FOB’s ability to enact critical process changes, or it could hinder expansion plans.

Additionally, FOBs tend to underinvest in R&D, which can limit innovation and entrepreneurial initiatives. This challenge can be compounded as the business moves further and further away from the founder’s entrepreneurial vision and prioritizes value preservation over high-risk business bets.

Family-owned businesses also face unique governance challenges relating to their ownership. For instance, all FOBs, regardless of size, industry, or regional focus, are confronted with succession-related questions as the business passes from one generation to the next. The founding generation may have been focused on aggressive growth, but subsequent generations may wrestle with maintaining or even transforming the company.

It has been posited that the largest wealth transfer in history will take place over the next 25 years, with an estimated $100 trillion moving from baby boomers to their heirs and charities. 1 The transfer of wealth from boomers to ‘zennials’ will shape the global economy,” Financial Times , August 22, 2023. Inheritors may find themselves grappling with several new challenges, including a changing global order , a push toward sustainable and inclusive investing, and the AI revolution. 2 “ Global flows: The ties that bind in an interconnected world ,” McKinsey Global Institute, November 15, 2022. How they lead through these disruptions will have a lasting impact on their companies, on business generally, and on society.

A broader look at performance among both FOBs and non-FOBs reveals further variations based on the size, age, and maturity level of these companies. For instance, the midsize FOBs in our research base, with annual revenues between $150 million to $5 billion, performed better than non-FOBs by being more efficient investors. They have delivered 10 percent higher capital turnover over the past five years compared with non-FOBs. Why? These midsize FOBs face fewer of the traditional market pressures to deliver short-term results. Their focus on the long term and their streamlined decision-making processes allow them to be more effective than non-FOBs at identifying investment opportunities that are in line with their purpose and goals, acting decisively, and quickly allocating resources against those opportunities.

Meanwhile, the large FOBs in our sample, with annual revenues between $5 billion and $100 billion, tend to be efficient operators that have delivered 1.5-percentage-point higher operating margins over the past five years compared with non-FOBs. The numbers likely reflect large FOBs’ ability to take advantage of process-related efficiencies and supply chain relationships developed over successive generations (Exhibit 2).

In addition, the family-owned businesses in our research base that are 25 years old and younger tend to have an aggressive growth mindset, increasing revenues twice as fast as non-FOBs as they channel the entrepreneurial energy of the founder. As they mature and transition into new generations of leadership, however, some FOBs start thinking less about big bets and more about preserving value. Others just lose the founder’s entrepreneurial edge. Their growth slows, falling more in line with that of non-FOBs (Exhibit 3).

4+5 equals FOB outperformance

Our research also revealed a notable gap in performance among FOBs and non-FOBs on our economic profit power curve , with a performance edge appearing across all quintiles. And the best-performing FOBs fared much better than the best-performing non-FOBs: the top two quintiles show a performance gap three times larger than the average of the lower quintiles. What’s more, the highest-performing FOBs capture the largest share of economic profit and drive outperformance across the entire FOB category (Exhibit 4).

Who are these outperformers? They comprise more than 120 FOBs in our research base, with ages ranging from under a decade to several centuries. They span ten sectors and operate across the world. Their average annual revenues range from $1 billion to $95 billion, with average economic profit of $730 million and average EBITDA margin of 20 percent.

Through our analyses, we learned that these top FOBs display four mindsets that are common to other FOBs but that are more pronounced in the outperformers. And, unlike most other FOBs, the outperformers combine the four critical mindsets with five strategic actions that help them achieve and sustain top-quintile performance that truly differentiates them (Exhibit 5).

Four critical mindsets of outperforming FOBs

Traces of the following four critical mindsets can be found in the DNA of all family-owned businesses, but these mindsets are more pronounced in the highest-performing FOBs relative to others.

1. They focus on purpose beyond profits

Our research shows that 93 percent of respondents from the highest-performing FOBs believe their company has a clear purpose beyond creating value for shareholders, as compared with 86 percent of the overall group of FOBs we surveyed. This sense of purpose can take many forms. It can be inward looking and focused on building the company’s legacy—for instance, by maintaining a strong reputation, protecting the brand image, or nurturing a strong company culture. Or it can be outward facing, focused on maximizing value for customers or generating positive impact in their communities. Whatever its nature, FOB respondents say they are willing to spend the time and resources needed to bring this purpose to life. Of the respondents from the highest-performing FOBs, 91 percent say they have formal mechanisms to ensure that employees understand, appreciate, and role model their purpose and values , as compared with 84 percent of the overall group of FOBs surveyed.

One place where this mindset is most strongly reflected is in the highest-performing companies’ efforts to support their communities. In our survey, leaders in 58 percent of the outperforming FOBs strongly agree with the assertion that their companies “embrace social responsibility and sustainability,” compared with 39 percent of leaders of other FOBs. One example of community support is a family-owned financial-services company in Latin America that tracks its environment, social, and governance efforts as closely as it does its financial performance. To foster transparency and accountability, it participates in all major market indexes that monitor sustainability and governance—both domestically and abroad.

The purpose-driven mindset is also reflected in the outperforming companies’ approach to hiring, promotion, and retention. Loyalty is a key value in most of these companies and, in our interviews, leaders revealed an ability to look “through the cycle” and avoid layoffs in crisis periods. One Indian conglomerate with roots dating back to the 1800s has basically adopted a “never fire” approach to talent management.

2. They take a long-term perspective and reinvest in the business

Leaders of outperforming FOBs cite their long-term perspective as one of the top three reasons for their success, alongside the ability to innovate and to expand into new markets and regions. They ruthlessly optimize for the longevity and resilience of the organization, even if it comes at the expense of short-term performance.

Ownership structure plays a critical role in the outperformers’ ability to maintain this long-term perspective: 92 percent of outperforming businesses in our research base have at least a 40 percent family ownership. Since they are not beholden to the demands of shareholders or the pressures of quarterly earnings reports, they can take a more patient and strategic approach to investing, which can ultimately lead to sustainable growth and success. One family-owned European retailer, for instance, had for decades remained resolutely focused on an “always buy, never sell” philosophy. In the late 1990s, it acquired an unprofitable brand, and, over a six-year period in which the acquired brand’s performance remained low, the company weathered public scrutiny and pressure to sell. Over time, however, the waiting game eventually paid off and the brand became one of the company’s most successful acquisitions.

Our research also revealed that FOBs, in general, tend to reinvest in the business rather than extract as much as they can from the company through dividends (Exhibit 6). They are not under the same pressures that non-FOBs are increasingly under to prioritize higher dividends to meet shareholder expectations. Indeed, over the past five years, FOBs worldwide delivered dividend yields that were 12 percent lower (on average) than those of non-FOBs.

3. They are financially conservative and cautious about debt and high-risk investments

In general, FOBs tend to be financially cautious, with leverage ratios that are, on average, six percentage points lower than those of non-FOBs. The outperforming FOBs have even lower leverage ratios, by nearly ten percentage points (Exhibit 7).

Interestingly, however, the outperformers say they take on more debt compared with other FOBs. For instance, about 40 percent of the outperformer respondents told us they use debt to finance more than 50 percent of their investments. By contrast, other FOB respondents told us they use debt to finance only 12 percent of their investments. Given that they are using their own money, FOBs often prefer to invest their funds in marketing, sales, manufacturing, and other parts of the business where there are clear paths for growth and some precedent for returns, rather than invest in high-risk areas such as R&D.

This cautious approach to finances also helps the outperformers weather significant economic shocks such as the 2008 global credit crisis and the recent COVID-19-triggered downturn—and emerge in better shape than other FOBs and non-FOBs. For example, a family-owned logistics business in Europe credits its financial conservatism as a critical factor in its relatively quick recovery from global supply chain shortages in 2021. Through the crisis period, the company held a steadfast focus on the long term and prioritized preserving its strong cash position, which allowed it to avoid bankruptcy the past few years while others were falling prey to industry contraction.

4. Their internal processes allow for efficient decision making

Our conversations with leaders in outperforming FOBs point to greater efficiency in decision making, in part because of two factors: centralized but flexible processes and engaged employees.

Despite the existence of investment committees, for instance, the big decisions taken by leaders and teams in outperforming FOBs are usually highly influenced by a single individual or several members of the family who can act more decisively than leaders in non-FOBs. The non-FOBs usually rely on multistage, multiparty processes that can be difficult and time-consuming to navigate.

Interestingly, the outperforming FOBs distinguish between efficient decision making and fast decision making: when family members agree, they make choices quickly. But when family members disagree, the outperformers take advantage of their flexible structures and processes to consider all the different points of view. They understand that decision making can be both quick and deliberate—and that the ability to adjust as needed is a true differentiator in performance.

The benefit of having engaged employees is that “once the CEO has a strategy in mind, it is easier to implement any changes,” leaders at one Japanese FOB told us. This approach to decision making has allowed the company to execute major category and market expansions every ten to 15 years.

Five strategic actions that set outperforming FOBs apart

Through our analyses, we discovered that the very best FOBs combine the four critical mindsets just described with five strategic actions that truly set them apart.

1. They actively diversify their portfolios

The outperforming FOBs in our research base have highly diversified portfolios. One conglomerate reaches more than one billion customers across its consumer goods, agriculture, and real estate divisions, among others. Another FOB started in waste management but has expanded into logistics, clean energy, and mobility solutions. Indeed, our research shows that 40 percent of the outperformers garner more than half of their revenues from streams outside their  core businesses . By contrast, only 7 percent of other FOBs had a similar share of noncore business revenues (Exhibit 8).

Moreover, 70 percent of the outperformers told us they will prioritize expansion beyond the core over the next five years by moving into new industries or geographies or by targeting disruptive businesses.

M&A seems to be the go-to diversification strategy for these organizations. Some 66 percent of respondents to our survey told us they pursued M&A to access new technologies, 63 percent to enter new industries, and nearly 60 percent to tap into new geographies.

Of course, not all M&A pursuits yield the same returns. Previous McKinsey research has found that programmatic M&A —that is, carefully choreographing a series of deals around a specific business case or M&A theme, instead of pursuing more organic, episodic, selective, or large transactions—is far more likely to lead to stronger performance and less risky for any organization. FOBs seem to be taking this message to heart: when asked about their M&A activity, about 40 percent of all FOBs told us they had pursued two or more small or midsize deals per year for the past ten years.

The current findings support previous McKinsey research  that shows FOBs tend to make smaller but more value-creating deals than non-FOBs. Leaders at a family-owned industrials company in Europe told us they actively try to avoid “core myopia.” For years, they said, they had failed to recognize growth opportunities in recycling and sustainability. Now, they prioritize and pursue small acquisitions that they think can enhance their market position. They decide which companies they intend to acquire and for how much, “remaining patient and avoiding rushing into transactions until the opportune moment arises.”

Further, many of the outperforming FOBs seemed more willing than peers to take bolder risks on occasion, with 58 percent indicating they had pursued at least one large deal in the past ten years, compared with 36 percent of other FOBs indicating the same.

2. They dynamically reallocate resources

Previous McKinsey research confirms that dynamic resource allocation   is one of the best ways to achieve growth in an organization. Companies that reallocate more resources more often have been shown to generate significantly higher returns to shareholders, experience less long-term variance on returns, and have a higher likelihood of avoiding acquisition or bankruptcy.

Our analyses show that outperforming FOBs aggressively and dynamically allocate their resources toward businesses, regions, and channels they believe will drive the most growth. In fact, about 60 percent of the outperformers said that, over the past five years, they had shifted more than 30 percent of their capital across businesses or regions, targeting higher-value opportunities. By contrast only 20 percent of other FOBs had done the same (Exhibit 9).

In general, FOBs enjoy an advantage in this area compared with non-FOBs. Their focus on purpose along with their longer-term perspective and efficient decision-making structures allow them to avoid the politics and inertia  that can drive allocation discussions off the rails.

Leaders from outperformer FOBs we spoke with say they take specific actions—in some cases, even cultural changes—to guard against inertia. A century’s worth of diversification has given one family-owned conglomerate in Asia footholds across a wide range of sectors—from petrochemicals to energy, retail, and telecommunications. But to balance out its strategic pursuit of growth, the conglomerate has also built into its finance and strategy discussions formal reevaluations of business performance. It periodically divests underperforming divisions and reduces its ownership interests while reinvesting those resources in higher-growth opportunities. This culture of growth through continuous improvement is so strong that last year the company announced a multibillion-dollar plan to transition from its core business in petrochemicals—which at one point accounted for more than three-quarters of the company’s revenues—to new opportunities in renewables.

Leaders attribute the company’s success to the founders’ direct, personal involvement in identifying big bets and building the financial, operational, and talent competencies required to reallocate resources and act on those bets.

3. They are efficient investors and operators

As mentioned earlier, at the outset of their tenures, FOBs tend to perform better than others because they can allocate capital more efficiently. But as they grow and scale, their outperformance tends to come more from efficient operations. Interestingly, the very best FOBs can do both.

Our data shows that the high-performing FOBs have a capital turnover ratio of 1.4—in line with that of outperforming non-FOBs and higher than that of all other FOBs in our sample. The high performers also report operating margins that are almost 10 percent higher than that of outperforming non-FOBs and nearly twice that of other FOBs in our research base (Exhibit 10).

Their higher-than-average investment and operating performance is driven by three factors. First is their operating DNA, which is passed down through generations and shapes the way their businesses operate, including decision making, customer service approach, talent management, and even developing functional expertise. In South Korea, for instance, the chairman of a family-owned apparel and footwear manufacturer has visited the production line daily for decades and knows each worker by name. Such direct involvement from the company founder has helped foster a sense of loyalty and ownership among employees. Through this access, workers are also getting a first-hand perspective on the operational challenges and opportunities across the organization—and, as a result, are deeply motivated to weigh in with potential solutions.

Second, compared with the other FOBs in our research base, the outperformers use a broader set of data to evaluate organizational performance. For instance, these businesses used more key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure executive performance, including top- and bottom-line figures and valuation metrics. When we asked all the FOB respondents in our research base which of seven designated metrics they had considered in evaluating executive compensation, the outperformers were 10 percent more likely, on average, to indicate that they were tracking all the KPIs we listed.

The last and arguably biggest differentiator is that outperforming FOBs focus on innovation. They invest twice as much in R&D as other FOBs do, and back up those investments with performance management systems. One US-based family-owned company that provides telecommunications and automotive services established a series of programs to support the creation of a tech-venture ecosystem in a part of the country that has not traditionally been a tech hub. The company launched an accelerator for tech start-ups and a not-for-profit program to drive job creation in adjacent industries. Through direct and indirect investments in these programs and companies, the company is helping others while ensuring its own access to top technology innovations and talent in the region.

4. They maintain a relentless focus on attracting, developing, and retaining talent

Talent management is an obsession for the highest-performing FOBs. In our survey, 86 percent of respondents at outperforming FOBs agree or completely agree that their company attracts the best talent. More than 90 percent either agree or completely agree that their company successfully identifies, trains, and develops top performers.

One family-owned luxury retailer in Europe takes an end-to-end approach to talent management. To attract recent graduates and younger workers, the company developed and launched a two-year, nine-part social media campaign—a series of “day in the life” posts filmed by and with existing employees. It also established a program to identify and train thousands of internal ambassadors to help and onboard newer workers. Partly due to these initiatives, the group has been voted a top employer among business school students for 18 years in a row in the retailer’s home country. At the senior-leader level, the company focuses on offering competitive salaries, which it benchmarks constantly. It also provides leaders exclusive proximity to members of the founder family, which creates a sense of personal attachment and accountability for the company’s results among senior leaders.

As a result of these efforts, the company boasts an average length of service between six and seven years—about three times higher than the typical tenure for employees at luxury retail companies. Almost one-quarter of the company’s workforce has been employed there for more than 15 years, and of these, more than 70 percent have been with the company for more than 20 years. The leaders’ perspective is that recruiting exceptional talent and retaining them for long tenures has allowed the company to build and maintain a strong culture of artistic expression, attention to detail, and long-term vision—traits that are crucial to success in a business that hinges on creativity and reinvention.

Also in our survey, more than 80 percent of outperforming FOB respondents report that their companies have built effective training programs to develop the next generation of family members. A family-owned electronics retailer in Africa, for instance, puts all family members interested in joining the company through a rigorous interview process (even tougher than their standard recruiting process) and places them in jobs that are aligned with their skill sets. An Asian FOB in the apparel industry mandates that family members do a series of role rotations, periodically tasking them with initiating new M&A deals, ventures, or resolving existing challenges to evaluate their problem-solving skills.

5. They continually review their governance mechanisms to ensure strong corporate performance across generations

Our research reveals that outperforming FOBs take the separation of family and business matters very seriously. About 80 percent of the outperformer company respondents reveal there is formal documentation in their companies with clear guidelines on the roles and responsibilities of family members. More than 90 percent of the outperformer respondents told us there is an effective and independent board of directors in place, compared with 72 percent of respondents from of all other FOBs who say the same. And 85 percent of respondents from outperforming FOBs report that their companies have a formal forum that meets regularly to discuss family and business issues, compared with only 66 percent of all other FOBs in our research base.

In interviews, leaders in the outperforming FOBs touted the benefits of having strict guidelines about family member roles and responsibilities, especially if the business is still family-led. At a second-generation 100 percent family-owned healthcare services business in the United States, two siblings share leadership roles. One is the president and focuses on strategic responsibilities across three business units, while the other is the chief growth officer and focuses on sales. Their positions very intentionally intersect but don’t overlap. And the siblings bring unique and complementary skills to the leadership team. Before they reached their current positions, however, the siblings spent time in different parts of the company to develop a sense of ownership and connection to the company culture, deepen their understanding of processes, develop their management skills, and most importantly, earn the trust and respect of the broader organization. What’s more, this pathway to leadership has been institutionalized at the company: a third-generation family member is on a similar development journey and currently serves as chief of staff.

Family governance, when well-executed, can be a powerful way to build corporate culture. However, FOBs may also want to look outside blood lines for leadership. Research has shown that professional management, when well identified and given the right conditions to prosper, can produce better results than family-only structures. 6 Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen, “Family firms need professional management,” Harvard Business Review , March 25, 2011. Indeed, FOBs are increasingly tapping into the expertise of professionals from outside the family, and our research shows that the outperformers do so even more. For instance, 95 percent of the outperforming FOBs in our research base indicated that they actively involve nonfamily executives in setting portfolio strategy, compared with 85 percent of all other FOBs in the research base.

One outperformer, a CPG company based in Latin America, decided last year to break a generations-long sequence of family leadership and hire a CEO externally. A family-owned European pharmaceutical company did the same. Both organizations followed practices that would be standard for any company, family-owned or not. For example, both engaged a global recruiter to conduct their searches and asked them to focus on talent rather than cultural fit. As FOBs grapple with the question of succession, they would do well to keep their focus more on longevity of the business rather than on continuing family stewardship.

This formula of four critical mindsets plus five strategic actions can help to ensure that FOBs capitalize on the potential for significant, profitable, and sustainable growth. The value at stake is substantial: companies that have implemented this formula successfully have been able to climb higher on the economic-profit curve over the past five years, moving up one or two quintiles. Others that follow this formula can do the same and potentially realize a fourfold increase in value creation over the next decade, according to our estimates.

The implementation will of course look different depending on the organization. Companies facing imminent generational transitions may need to focus first on shoring up their governance mechanisms and succession planning. Businesses in stagnant or vulnerable industries may want to focus first on dynamic capital allocation practices to boost their investments in R&D, new business building, and M&A. The formula must be applied judiciously, and with careful attention to what will be most effective given their specific circumstances.

Regardless, the 4+5 formula provides a path for FOBs (and non-FOBs), of all sizes and ages, to improve their performance and continue to do what they have done for decades—support sustainable and inclusive economic growth, raise employment, and improve healthcare and education in communities around the world.

Eduardo Asaf is a partner in McKinsey’s Mexico City office, where Igor Carvalho and Jose Tellechea are consultants; Acha Leke is a senior partner in the Johannesburg office; and Francesco Malatesta is an associate partner in the Dubai office.

The authors wish to thank Aliyah Allie, Michael Birshan, Fredrik Dahlqvist, Gemma D’Auria, Heinz-Peter Elstrodt, Avinash Goyal, Franck Laizet, Ari Libarikian, David Quigley, Liz Hilton Segel, and Sergio Waisser for their contributions to this report.

This article was edited by Roberta Fusaro, an editorial director based in the Waltham, Massachusetts, office.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

Joining the family business: An emerging opportunity for investors

Fine-tuning family businesses for a new era

Global flows: The ties that bind in an interconnected world

US State and Regional Energy Innovation Index

Vibrant regional energy innovation ecosystems are important for any national net-zero strategy. But to understand the potential contributions they can make to the price and performance of clean energy technologies, we must first benchmark the resources they bring to bear.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Key takeaways.

Key Takeaways 1

Introduction . 2

Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Engines of the Energy Transition . 3

From TBED to CEBED: The Regional Moment in U.S. Energy and Climate Innovation Policy 5

Measuring State and Regional Energy Innovation Ecosystems 7

The Index 11

Conclusions and Recommendations 18

Appendix 1: Indicators and Weights 20

Appendix 2: Methodology and Sources 20

Appendix 3: Search Strategies 20

Endnotes 21

Introduction

The United States, along with the rest of the world, has embarked on a transition to clean energy. The transition’s ultimate endpoint is net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to limit the impact of climate change. Energy security, human health, local environmental protection, and economic opportunity also motivate the global community to pursue this important objective. But the path to net zero is strewn with obstacles. Many of the technologies the world needs to stay on it are too expensive, perform too poorly, or are simply unavailable right now. Innovation should therefore be a major focus of any net-zero strategy. [1]

Regional energy innovation ecosystems have great potential to contribute to such strategies. Geographically concentrated networks of technology and service firms, research institutions, and nonprofit and public sector entities could drive price and performance improvements in a diverse array of clean energy sources and uses. This report assesses the potential of energy innovation ecosystems across the United States to contribute to this important mission, drawing on a wide range of data, such as federal and private funding, publications and patents, and state and regional policies and public opinion, covering nine categories of innovation system functions, to compile an index of this potential. Fourteen technology-specific indices, which draw on subsets of the main database, complement the main index and highlight regional diversity.

The index, while inevitably imperfect, provides a baseline against which to measure the future impact of recent federal legislation. Landmark bills passed by Congress in 2021 and 2022 support states and regions that seek to strengthen their energy innovation ecosystems. Quite a few states and regions had already begun to do so before the new federal programs were created, and many more are now responding to these opportunities. The report concludes by offering broad suggestions for sustaining this momentum and improving the odds that the new policies will succeed.

Explore the five accompanying data visualizations for detailed profiles of states , regions , metropolitan statistical areas , combined statistical areas , and metropolitan divisions , respectively:

Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Engines of the Energy Transition

Abundant, affordable, reliable energy is a fundamental requirement of a high standard of living. A small handful of individuals, following Thoreau, may choose a life of voluntary simplicity, but the vast majority of the world’s population seeks the comforts and opportunities that are widely available in high-income countries. While these need not be supplied as wastefully as they are now, especially in the United States, they intrinsically demand substantial energy inputs.

The Industrial Revolution, which brought for the first time a measure of comfort and opportunity to a large proportion of the population in the places it swept through, rested on energy from fossil fuels. That pattern continues today, with these same fuels providing about 80 percent of global primary energy. They remain abundant and reasonably affordable and reliable, but the social costs of burning them have mounted. Most notably, fossil fuel combustion accounts for about 75 percent of the GHG emissions that are driving catastrophic storms, wildfires, and other symptoms of global climate change. [2]

The challenge facing human civilization, then, is to enable all those who desire to live at a high standard to have the quantity and quality of energy they need to do so, while simultaneously and dramatically reducing the harm that would cause. As Gaster, Atkinson, and Righter argue, new and improved energy technologies that emit far fewer GHGs, while matching (or nearly so) the price and performance of the incumbents, lie at the core of any strategy with any chance of surmounting this monumental challenge. [3]

A diverse array of such innovations are needed. Some, such as solar panels and heat pumps, are well advanced, though still capable of significant improvement. Many others, such as green steel and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) removal, are early in their development. Many of these new technologies are complex systems themselves, and nearly all must be further integrated with even more complex systems, such as the power grid. [4]

Energy innovation is a subject of discussion in international climate talks and figures into many national policies. Some national governments are making important contributions by funding clean energy research, development, and demonstration, fostering climate-tech venture investments, and the like. But the innovation rubber really hits the energy transition road at the regional level. That’s because innovation, especially innovation in complex systems, accelerates most quickly when dense networks of firms and supporting institutions, clustered in relatively compact geographic areas, pursue it. [5]

The concept of regional innovation ecosystems is an old one, dating back to the 19th century economist Alfred Marshall, who noted “something in the air” in places such as Sheffield, where Britain’s pioneering cutlery makers were concentrated. Modern research has revealed that “something” to have many elements: When working effectively, regional innovation ecosystems foster knowledge exchange, attract specialized labor, facilitate infrastructure investment, and encourage entrepreneurship, among other things. Regions diverge economically in large part because of these ecosystems. Some are home to innovative industries that serve growing markets beyond the regions in which they are located, while others rely on stagnant or shrinking sectors. Silicon Valley and Detroit epitomize these extremes in the public mind. [6]

Digitalization might have been expected to undermine these dynamics, but, as many analysts have noted, “the death of distance has been greatly exaggerated.” Van der Wouden and Youn, for instance, find that while the geographical distance between research collaborators grew substantially between 1975 and 2015, so had the “learning premium” associated with geographical proximity. Those who collaborated locally were far more likely to enter new fields and build their own capabilities than those who collaborated long distance. The effect was especially strong in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines, such as chemistry, materials science, and engineering, which are particularly important in energy innovation. [7]

The systemic nature of energy innovation heightens the importance of collaboration within regions. Innovative low-carbon power, transportation, and industrial systems typically involve diverse components that must be integrated carefully to optimize performance and minimize cost and emissions. These integration processes, in turn, often require learning-by-doing and learning-by-using across organizational and institutional boundaries. Geographic proximity is likely to ease them by facilitating hands-on and face-to-face interactions. [8]

The importance of regional energy innovation ecosystems in the coming decades will be heightened by the vulnerability to disruption of places dependent today on fossil-fuel-based industries. Wyoming’s coal mines, Houston’s petrochemical plants, and Detroit’s auto factories are among those at risk. Hanson, a co-author of 2016’s “The China Shock” paper (a belated recognition of that epochal impact by neoclassical economists) wrote that “the energy transition … is a shock foretold” for such regions. [9]

Whether such “brownfield” regions are willing and able to repurpose their existing assets or build new ones to seize the opportunities presented by the transition will go a long way toward determining their future economic dynamism in a low-carbon world. Wyoming’s effort to position itself as a leader in nuclear power and carbon capture, Houston’s push to become a hydrogen hub, and Detroit’s emerging shift to electric vehicles illustrate these dynamics. Of course, such retooling regions must frequently compete with “greenfield” locations elsewhere, domestically and globally. [10]

That competition has important consequences for the energy transition. If regional innovation ecosystems are able to lower the cost and improve the performance of emissions-reducing technologies, their uptake will expand, feeding ideas and resources back to the regions that make them. This virtuous cycle extending beyond the region will be enhanced and enabled by international agreements and national policies, but ultimately depends on positive feedbacks within the region among laboratories, factories, testbeds, and related facilities, organizations, and institutions.

From TBED to CEBED: The Regional Moment in U.S. Energy and Climate Innovation Policy

Some regional innovation ecosystems specializing in low-carbon technology have emerged relatively spontaneously. Wind energy innovation revitalized Denmark’s central Jutland region, for instance, repurposing older manufacturing assets beginning in the 1970s and later fending off higher-tech competitors elsewhere. Others have been built up more deliberately. The solar power manufacturing cluster in China’s Yangtze River Delta was created in the 2000s in large measure by targeted local, provincial, and national policies. [11]

The deliberate approach to building such ecosystems is likely to dominate going forward, as the need for energy innovation, and the extra-regional export opportunities created by the energy transition, are increasingly evident to policymakers worldwide. China’s success in solar manufacturing is part of a broader strategy to dominate emerging clean technologies. The European Union is pursuing a “smart specialization strategy” with an increasingly green tilt to diversify its regional economies and move them “up the ladder of higher knowledge complexity and value creation.” [12]

Some state and local governments in the United States adopted such strategies in the 2010s. New York has sought to establish its southern tier as a global center for energy storage manufacturing, while Colorado’s Front Range region has become a hub for cleantech start-ups. Until recently, however, the U.S. federal government has not kept pace with its global competitors in this regard. [13]

That changed with the passage of major legislation by the 117th Congress (2021–2022). New programs supported regional innovation ecosystems and technology-based economic development (TBED) across all industries, encouraging many states and regions to propose initiatives focusing on clean energy technologies. Five out of 21 regional coalitions that won the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, funded by the Department of Commerce (DOC) under the 2021 American Rescue Plan, focused on energy innovation. So did 7 of DOC’s 31 regional tech hubs designees and 7 of its 18 regional strategy development grantees, a program authorized by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. (See box 1 for a brief description of this program.) Six of the 10 winners of regional “engine” grants selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (also under CHIPS and Science) are seeking to drive sustainable energy or climate-related innovation as well. [14]

In addition, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act established programs and funding streams specifically to catalyze regional energy innovation. The new DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), for instance, is implementing an $8 billion program to create regional hubs for clean hydrogen production, distribution, and use. OCED has roughly $20 billion more for large-scale demonstration projects in other technology areas, including $6.3 billion for industrial decarbonization. DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management has received an additional $3.5 billion to fund direct air capture hubs. More broadly, Congress has explicitly tasked DOE with responsibility for fostering regional competitiveness through clean energy innovation, and given preference to fossil-fuel-dependent communities in many of these programs. [15]

The response to these bills indicates that an increasing number of states and regions in the United States are seeking to enhance their competitive advantages in a world striving for net-zero emissions. (Box 2 briefly describes a regional strategy and box 3 a state strategy.) Their efforts fold into a broader discourse around TBED and “place-based” policies. Best practice in these domains rests on a grounded assessment of existing state and regional assets that allows identification of “adjacent possible” sectors. These are sectors with a realistic potential for future export growth rather than fantastic dreams of building the next Silicon Valley. [16]

This report advances the movement toward Clean Energy Based Economic Development (CEBED) by applying insights from the large corpus of analytical work that underpins TBED. We have compiled a wide range of indicators that measure how well a region’s energy innovation system is functioning today. We hope the findings will inform strategies to build a more prosperous and cleaner future.

Federal Regional Technology and Innovation Hub Program (Tech Hubs)

The Tech Hubs program, initially proposed by ITIF, was authorized by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. It seeks to enable regions (Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) or closely connected MSAs and nearby micropolitan statistical areas) to become globally competitive in “industries of the future.” Such industries lie within the ambit of 10 broad technology areas laid out in the act, including “advanced energy and industrial efficiency” as well as “disaster prevention or mitigation.” Congress authorized $10 billion for the program and appropriated $500 million through fiscal year 2023. [17]

Regional consortia seeking Tech Hubs grants from the Economic Development Administration (EDA), a unit of DOC, must include an institution of higher education; state, local, or tribal governments; industry; labor; and economic development organizations. These consortia must set forth a compelling narrative that describes a region’s potential to achieve world-class status, the barriers that impede its achievement, and projects that would address those barriers. Projects may advance innovation, strengthen the workforce, develop business and entrepreneurship opportunities, and build infrastructure. [18]

In October 2023, EDA designated 31 consortia as eligible for 5 to 10 grants of $50 million to $75 million. It also awarded 29 strategy development grants of roughly $500,000, 11 to consortia eligible now and 18 to consortia that may become eligible in future phases of the program. In addition to EDA funding, Tech Hubs will receive preferential treatment in a variety of other federal programs, such as those supporting foreign direct investment and providing export assistance. [19]

Seven of the eligible consortia fall within the categories of “Accelerating America’s Clean Energy Transition” and “Strengthening Our Critical Minerals Supply Chain”:

§ Louisiana: offshore wind and renewable energy

§ Idaho and Wyoming: small modular reactors (SMR) and advanced nuclear

§ South Carolina: exportable electricity technologies

§ Florida: sustainable and resilient infrastructure

§ New York: batteries

§ Nevada: lithium

§ Missouri: battery materials

Several others will contribute less directly to energy innovation, such as gallium nitride technology (Vermont), which underpins power system electronics. [20]

The governing statute for the program enumerates 13 considerations for selecting hubs, which EDA has distilled into 7 broad criteria: project quality and ability to execute, impact on economic and national security, investment and policy commitments, workforce, capital, equity and diversity, and governance. A consortium’s plan to leverage existing innovation assets is included in the first, fourth, and fifth criteria, while its forecast for the targeted technology’s impact and prospects for retaining manufacturing are incorporated into the second. [21]

Measuring State and Regional Energy Innovation Ecosystems

Energy innovation ecosystems are made up of complex networks of actors, institutions, and resources that contribute to the generation, development, diffusion, and use of innovative energy products and services. To be effective, such systems must perform a broad range of functions, including mobilizing resources, developing and diffusing new scientific and technical knowledge, facilitating experimentation by entrepreneurs, facilitating the formation of supply chains and new markets, legitimizing new technologies in society, guiding the search for new knowledge in certain directions, and guiding its spillover into other related industries. [22]

Our index is built from the following four subindices that seek to capture distinct groups of these functions:

▪ Knowledge development and diffusion

▪ Entrepreneurial experimentation

▪ Supply chain and market formation

▪ Social legitimation

In this section, we briefly review the categories and indicators included in each of the four subindices. Most indicators are available at the county level and are aggregated to the regional and state levels.

In addition to the main index, our work provides insights into regional technological specializations, which vary greatly across the United States. (See figure 1 for a comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina.) Fourteen technology areas, each of which is covered by an index that draws on a subset of the main database and is constructed in the same fashion, are listed at the end of this section.

A very detailed account of sources and methods can be found in appendix 2.

Subindex: Knowledge Development and Diffusion

Knowledge development and diffusion activities comprise the first subindex. Unless new scientific and technical knowledge is developed and diffused, no new clean energy innovations will emerge, and there will be nothing to scale up. The subindex consists of three categories of indicators.

Category: Research and Development

Mobilization of resources to fund research and development (R&D) activities performed by companies, government laboratories, and academic institutions lies at the base of this subindex. The public sector plays a larger role in energy R&D than in many other sectors, in large part because the transition to clean energy is being driven by the environmental threat of climate change, and markets have not been responsive to it. The category focuses on federal low-carbon energy R&D spending, which far outpaces state and local investments, assessing the ability of states and regions to garner federal awards.

Category: Knowledge

R&D funding contributes to scientific discoveries. The quality of this new knowledge varies considerably. Most discoveries end up having little scientific or commercial value, while highly valued knowledge is ultimately recognized by and diffused through networks of academic and professional peers. We use data on publications as a proxy for new discoveries and data on publication citations to estimate their quality and extent of diffusion.

Category: Invention

R&D funding also to contributes to the development of technical know-how and the generation of new inventions. Like new knowledge, the quality and commercial viability of inventions varies considerably. We use data on patents as a proxy for new inventions and data on patent citations to estimate their quality and extent of diffusion.

Subindex: Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Entrepreneurial experimentation activities comprise the second subindex. These activities largely involve a different set of actors, institutions, and processes than those involved in knowledge development and diffusion, whose aim is to test and demonstrate the commercial viability of new technological innovations in niche markets.

Category: Demonstration

Technology demonstration projects seek to establish the market viability of new clean energy innovations. The public sector plays a larger role in energy demonstration projects than in many other sectors due to the high-risk nature and long development horizons of many emerging energy technologies. We use federal spending data to assess the ability of states and regions to garner federal awards for energy demonstration projects.

Category: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs create new ventures that carry out the high-risk technological, business, and social experiments that must be performed before innovative energy products and services can join the mainstream. These new ventures may receive support from venture capitalists and federal grants and, when successful, scale up by exiting through acquisitions or initial public offerings (IPOs). We use data on federal seed investments, venture capital investments, and successful company exits to assess state and regional contributions to the entrepreneurship function.

Subindex: Supply Chain and Market Formation

Supply chain and market formation activities comprise the third subindex. Successful scale-up of innovations, whether carried out by a new or established business, depends on the availability of inputs at a competitive cost and on a growing array of buyers who find value in deploying these innovations. Some supply chains and markets may lie within the state or region where an innovation is made, although these functions frequently extend beyond these boundaries. Proximity to suppliers and customers can provide valuable feedback as innovations bridge from early adoption to mass markets.

Category: Industry

A central goal of CEBED is to create jobs and steady employment in clean energy industries. We use data on low-carbon energy employment to assess the ability of states and regions to create such jobs and strengthen state and regional supply chains.

Category: Technology Adoption

A long-term CEBED strategy ultimately depends on generating an abundant and reliable supply of low-carbon energy resources to power industrial activities and ensure sustainable economic development. We use data on the supply of low-carbon electricity generation and energy storage resources to assess the ability of states and regions to mobilize resources and facilitate market formation for building clean energy infrastructure.

Subindex: Social Legitimation

Social legitimation activities comprise the fourth subindex. Innovation is an intrinsically social process. Incumbent energy technologies are often buttressed by political, legal, and regulatory mechanisms and embedded in supportive state and regional cultures. The more innovations disrupt legacy systems, the more effort is required for them to break through to widespread adoption.

Category: Public Goals and Strategies

Social legitimation of innovations and CEBED depends on the goals and strategies of policymakers. We use data on published public policy and strategy documents to assess the degree to which states and regions have adopted CEBED strategies.

Category: Social Values

In a democracy, social legitimation and CEBED policies ultimately depend on the values of the general public. We use data on public opinion about clean energy R&D and climate action to assess the extent to which the citizens of states and regions value clean energy innovation and CEBED.

Technological Specialization

A function of energy innovation ecosystems that adds significant depth to the index is guidance on the direction of the search for new technologies, and ultimately, CEBED. The clean energy transition is a deliberate and purposeful attempt to guide the economy away from dependence on unabated fossil fuels and toward a sustainable path of low-carbon energy production and use. Within that overarching framework, energy innovation ecosystems may also be guided toward specific technology areas. The index seeks to capture these technological specializations at the state and regional level. These are measured by subindices covering fourteen technology areas:

1. Advanced energy materials

2. Bioenergy

3. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)

4. Clean energy manufacturing

5. Clean energy transportation

6. Energy efficiency

7. Energy storage

8. Geothermal energy

9. Grid technologies

10. Hydrogen and fuel cells

11. Nuclear energy

12. Solar energy

13. Water energy

14. Wind energy

Limitations

Our measures of state and regional energy innovation ecosystems are imperfect. For instance, private R&D spending is a very important input to these ecosystems, but it is not measured adequately enough to incorporate into the index. Data constraints also limit our visibility into clean energy employment and state and regional clean energy innovation policies in the third and fourth subindices. In the final section of this report, we recommend that federal agencies invest in improved measurement systems so that state and regional economic development strategists can become better informed.

New Energy New York

New York State’s Southern Tier, an eight-county region bordering Pennsylvania, was a thriving center of manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century. Major U.S. firms such as IBM and General Electric called the Southern Tier home. While the region’s strength in electronics manufacturing cushioned the blow, the Southern Tier suffered a long decline in the second half of the 20th century, which has worsened since then. [23]

New Energy New York (NENY) is a regional initiative led by Binghamton University that seeks to help revive the area by creating a globally competitive battery technology development and manufacturing hub. The NENY coalition includes state and local government agencies along with universities and a variety of community and nonprofit organizations. The initiative’s key elements include technology prototyping, supplier identification and certification, workforce development, and start-up incubation, with attention to equity across diverse populations throughout. [24]

The initiative emerged from a longer-term effort by both Binghamton to develop its innovation capacity in the wake of deindustrialization and by the state to target clean energy industries for economic development. A series of grants from federal and state sources, capped by a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)-funded clean energy incubator, put Binghamton in position to compete effectively in the new federal grant programs. M. Stanley Whittingham, a Binghamton University distinguished professor who won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the invention of the lithium-ion battery, played a foundational role in establishing NENY’s credibility. A battery “gigafactory” being developed by iM3NY, on a site where IBM manufactured products from 1911 to 2002, is another anchor asset. [25]

With strong support from the state’s congressional delegation and significant state investments, NENY has run the table in federal grant competitions. It won $63.7 million In EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge to construct a technology and manufacturing development center equipped with state-of-the-art manufacturing lines for the production of full-size battery cells. It was designated as an EDA Tech Hub, enabling it to compete for $50 million to $75 million in the next phase of the program and benefit from preferential treatment in other federal programs. In early 2024, it took home an NSF Regional Engine award worth $15 million over the next two years and up to $160 million in the next decade to carry out R&D, technology translation, and workforce development for the battery industry. NENY and its partners must now execute the challenging commitments they have made to secure these investments. [26]

This section reports illustrative results from the ITIF State and Regional Energy Innovation Index. The weighting scheme used to compile the index is set forth in appendix 1. The full results and the underlying database, which cover all 50 states and the District of Columbia and up to 935 regions (Core-Based Statistical Areas, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget), can be accessed through the ITIF Center for Clean Energy Innovation website. The website allows users to find scores for the overall index, four subindices, and nine functional categories for user-specified states or regions for the years 2016 to 2021. Users can also find the 14 technology-specific versions of these scores and generate charts displaying a location’s functional and technological strengths and weaknesses. The site also features national heat maps of this data.

Table 1 reports the top five and bottom five states in the 2021 Index and their strongest and weakest functional categories and technology areas. States with small populations take the top slots, perhaps because many index categories are scaled by the size of the state population or economy. Nonetheless, the index reveals important strengths and weaknesses. For example, while the Index’s top-ranked state, Vermont, ranks well across most categories, it is especially strong in start-ups (measured by federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, private venture capital investments, and successful company exits). The #2 state, South Dakota, by contrast, does well in technology adoption, thanks to the importance of wind power there, but does relatively poorly in generating and diffusing original research through scientific publications. Neighboring North Dakota, which ranks fifth overall, shows an even sharper contrast, capturing a disproportionate share of federal R&D spending for its size but coming in 48th in the social legitimation subindex due to very low public support for low-carbon energy research and climate action. The technology specializations reveal similar divergences. Hawaii, for instance, ranks last in grid technologies but sixth in solar energy.

Table 1: Top and bottom states and their strengths and weaknesses in the 2021 index

Table 2 reports the top 5 and bottom 5 out of 382 MSAs in the 2021 Index and their strongest and weakest functional categories and technology areas. Like the state index, the regional index reveals important strengths and weaknesses. The top region, which is in central Virginia, for instance, is at the top of the supply chain and market formation subindex, which includes clean energy employment, but only 123rd in the entrepreneurial experimentation subindex. The bottom region, Rome, Georgia, actually matches the top region in the entrepreneurship ranking, but is pulled down by extreme weakness in all the other subindices. Among larger, better-known metro regions, the San Francisco metropolitan region ranks 79th, Chicago 269th, Atlanta 293rd, and New York City 295th out of the 382 MSAs.

Table 2: Top and bottom regions and their strengths and weaknesses in the 2021 Index

Table 3 and table 4 report illustrative results for 5 of the 14 technology areas at the state and regional levels, respectively, for 2021. Vermont’s top ranking in the overall index is reflected in its high ranks in four of these five areas, while Rhode Island, which ranked 34th overall, leads in wind energy technological innovation. Similarly, among MSA regions, Bangor, Maine, ranks 1st in wind energy technological innovation (and 2nd in water technological innovation, which is not shown), but 25th overall and as low as 221st in hydrogen and 230th in nuclear energy.

Table 3: Top ten states across five technology areas in 2021

Table 4: Top ten regions across five technology areas in 2021

Finally, figure 1 and figure 2 compare two states in the middle of the rankings, Massachusetts (ranked 25th) and South Carolina (ranked 26th) to illustrate their functional and technological similarities and differences. Massachusetts outshines South Carolina in entrepreneurship and societal values, while South Carolina displays greater strength in clean energy employment (industry) and technology adoption. Across technological areas, Massachusetts ranks in the top 10 states across most, but in the bottom third in transportation and hydrogen. South Carolina’s top area is nuclear energy, where it ranks 4th, while its worst showing is in energy efficiency, where it ranks 28th.

Figure 1: Functional comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina

Figure 2: Technological comparison of Massachusetts and South Carolina

South Carolina Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy

The state of South Carolina entered the modern manufacturing economy in the early 1990s when German automaker BMW sited a new campus there. The auto plant and the industrial ecosystem that grew up around it took the place of a textile industry in decline. A decade later, Boeing began building parts of its 787 Dreamliner in the state, which is now the sole assembly site for the plane. A sprawling network of suppliers grew up around these anchor facilities. Manufacturing production and employment surged as the sector regained its role as a pillar of the state economy. [27]

When the federal Tech Hubs program was announced, the state’s economic development agency had completed a roadmapping exercise that identified further diversification of manufacturing as a key strategy. Burgeoning global markets in fields such as electric vehicles, nuclear power, and renewables beckoned. Tech Hub’s “advanced energy” key technology focus area aligned with this strategy. [28]

The state assembled a broad cross-sectoral coalition to support its Tech Hub proposal, including manufacturers such as Rolls Royce and Westinghouse, utilities, educational institutions, and DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory, along with numerous state agencies. The South Carolina Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy (SC Nexus) seeks to create a “globally leading hub driving innovation in core technologies that enable an end-to-end resilient, sustainable energy ecosystem across clean-electricity generation, distribution, and grid-scale storage.” [29] The proposal targets manufacturing of components for nuclear, offshore wind, hydrogen, and solar photovoltaic systems; the creation of a battery innovation and testing ecosystem; and power grid re-engineering. It includes a plan to establish an incubator to support the state’s advanced energy entrepreneurs. [30]

SC Nexus’s designation as a Tech Hub in October 2023 allows it to compete for a phase 2 award of $50 million to $75 million. Its phase 2 application, submitted in February 2024, focuses on manufacturing distributed energy resource systems and enabling their innovative use. It includes testbeds and simulation resources for improving grid operations and security, drawing on DOE and Department of Defense as well as academic capabilities, and a new enegy storage institute that aims to commercialize new technologies for grid-scale use. Whether or not the state wins this award, it plans to continue with the SC Nexus strategy. [31]

Conclusions and Recommendations

Regional innovation ecosystems have the potential to become vital engines of the global transition to low-carbon energy. The creation and strengthening of agile, geographically proximate learning networks of research institutions, suppliers, and producers, loosely coordinated by public and nonprofit regional organizations, offers a promising pathway to drive price and performance improvements in many specialized domains of clean-tech production and use.

The United States ought to be home to many of these ecosystems. As the world’s largest historic source of emissions, it has an obligation to contribute to climate solutions; as the world’s leader in science, technology, and innovation, it has tremendous potential to do so.

The ITIF State and Regional Energy Innovation Index provides a comprehensive map of that potential. This report summarizes indicators that seek to measure a wide range of energy innovation ecosystem functions including knowledge discovery and dissemination, entrepreneurial experimentation, supply chains and market formation, and social legitimation. These indicators are available at multiple geographical levels, including states and metropolitan regions, and cover 14 technological domains.

Economic development organizations in the United States are increasingly cognizant of the potential benefits of clean energy innovation. Recent federal legislation has amplified that awareness and provided resources to act on it. This index provides a baseline against which to measure the impacts of federal programs growing from that legislation in the coming years.

These prospective impacts would be enhanced by sustaining and improving key features of the new programs. We offer several recommendations to this end.

▪ The federal government should continue to support the development and implementation of innovation-based state and regional development strategies, including those relying on clean energy innovation. The economic development programs created by Congress over the last three years are fundamentally sound and long overdue. The CHIPS and Science Act provides the authority to expand several of them substantially. While fiscal conditions may not allow fully authorized levels to be reached for some time, moderate growth is necessary to sustain the institutional momentum that these programs have created at the state and regional levels. The strong bottom-up interest in clean energy innovation ensures that it will have a robust place in state and local strategies as long as federal resources continue to flow. [32]

▪ Federal programs supporting state and regional economic development strategies should continue to use evaluation criteria that enable clean energy innovation. The new programs generally mandate that federal grants address critical national challenges. The Tech Hubs program, for example, includes “advanced energy” as one of its key technology focus areas that may be tackled by applicants. Both the broad requirement to address national challenges and the specific inclusion of clean energy innovation within it are appropriate. Energy security, reliability, and affordability, and limiting the impact of climate change, are long-term, large-scale challenges to which clean energy innovation, rooted in regional industrial clusters, is an essential response. [33]

▪ Federal agencies should support data collection and related research that enable state and regional economic development strategists to make better-informed decisions about the growth potential and resource and asset requirements of industries drawing on clean energy innovation. A major difficulty in devising economic development strategies is that the industries of the future may not look like industries of the past. The infrastructure, skill requirements, supply chains, and technological foundations will evolve and may even transform. The difficulty is particularly acute for clean energy innovation because unabated fossil fuel combustion is so deeply embedded in the core technologies of many legacy sectors. Electric vehicles are very different from conventional cars, and green steelmaking processes look nothing like blast furnaces. While uncertainty about the future cannot be eliminated, a concerted national research program would help reduce it as well as help align expectations across regions about opportunities and threats posed by the energy transition. [34]

▪ Federal programs should continue to support state and regional capacity-building for clean energy innovation so that bottom-up strategies stand a better chance of success. States and regions vary in their sophistication about economic development and administrative capacity to execute strategies. Congress and federal implementing agencies impose uniform requirements that are challenging for a significant fraction of state and regional applicants to fulfill. For instance, the NSF Regional Engines program requires cross-sectoral partnerships that can translate new research into tangible economic outcomes, which many regions lack. The program recognizes that applicants do not start on a level playing field, and it prioritizes “regions … without well-established innovation ecosystems.” [35] For this approach to succeed, the agency will need to be patient, recognize potential as well as achievement in evaluating proposals, and cultivate that potential in the post-award period by encouraging awardees to build capacity.

▪ Federal programs supporting state and regional economic development strategies should strengthen coordination among themselves to reduce the administrative burdens on applicants to these programs and to ensure the programs are mutually complementary. A common theme in the discourse among participants in state and regional economic development policy is application fatigue. Applications for federal funds are lengthy and complex, and are not uniform across agencies. Congressional mandates bind federal agencies to some degree, but agencies have discretion to make the process easier without sacrificing either its legality or effectiveness. Federal program managers are aware of this challenge and have taken steps to address it. NSF and EDA have entered into a formal memorandum of understanding, for instance. They are collaborating to make their place-based grants with overlapping focus areas and regions of service “stackable” and exploring joint reporting, among other things. [36] DOE’s technology-specific programs seem to be less engaged in these interagency processes.

The U.S. economy’s ability to adapt to changing geopolitical, environmental, social, and technological circumstances has been an enduring strength throughout its history. The nation’s regional economies, individually and collectively, are a key element of this strength. This strength will be tested again by the energy transition and global climate change. Public policy at all levels of governance can and should foster regional clean energy innovation ecosystems to enable the nation to pass this latest test.

Appendix 1: Indicators and Weights

(See the PDF, pages 20–42 .)

Appendix 2: Methodology and Sources

(See the PDF, pages 43–59 .)

Appendix 3: Search Strategies

(See the PDF, pages 60–68 .)

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rob Atkinson, Robin Gaster, and Erica Schaffer of ITIF, Lachlan Carey and colleagues from RMI’s Accelerating Clean Regional Economies initiative, and numerous interviewees for sharing their ideas and experiences with us.

About the Authors

Chad A. Smith is a doctoral student in public policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government

David M. Hart is a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is a senior fellow at ITIF and the former director of ITIF’s Center for Clean Energy Innovation. Prof. Hart co-authored Energizing America (Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy, 2020), Unlocking Energy Innovation (MIT Press, 2012), and numerous ITIF reports.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute that has been recognized repeatedly as the world’s leading think tank for science and technology policy. Its mission is to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress. For more information, visit itif.org/about .

[1] .     Robin Gaster, Robert D. Atkinson, and Ed Rightor, “Beyond Force: A Realist Pathway Through the Green Transition,” ITIF, July 10, 2023, https://itif.org/publications/2023/07/10/beyond-force-a-realist-pathway-through-the-green-transition/ .

[2] .     International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2023 (Paris: IEA, 2023), 101; United Nations, “Causes and Effects of Climate Change,” accessed January 11, 2024, https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change .

[3] .     Gaster, Atkinson, and Rightor, “Beyond Force.”

[4] .     International Energy Agency, “ETP Clean Energy Technology Guide,” accessed April 5, 2024, https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/etp-clean-energy-technology-guide .

[5] .     Chad Smith and David M. Hart, “The 2021 Global Energy Innovation Index: National Contributions to the Global Clean Energy Innovation System,” ITIF, October 18, 2021, https://itif.org/publications/2021/10/18/2021-global-energy-innovation-index-national-contributions-global-clean/ ; Bjorn T. Asheim, Arne Isaksen, and Michaela Trippl, “The role of the regional innovation system approach in contemporary regional policy: Is it still relevant in a globalised world?” in Asheim and Manuel Gonzalez-Lopez, eds., Regions and Innovation Policies in Europe (Springer 2020).

[6] .     Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter, and Scott Stern, “Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance,” Research Policy 43:1785-1799 (2014), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2014.05.007 ; Robert D. Atkinson, Mark Muro, and Jacob Whiton, “The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America,” ITIF, December 9, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/12/09/case-growth-centers-how-spread-tech-innovation-across-america/ .

[7] .     Frank van der Wouden and Hyejin Youn, “The Impact of Geographical Distance on Learning Through Collaboration,” Research Policy 52(2):104698 (March 2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2022.104698 .

[8] .     Philip Cooke, “Transition Regions: Regional-National Eco-Innovation Systems and Strategies,” Progress in Planning 76(3): 105–146 (October 2011), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2011.08.002 .

[9] .     Gordon H. Hanson, “Local Labor Market Impacts of the Energy Transition: Prospects and Policies,” Harvard Kennedy School RWP23-005, January 2023, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/local-labor-market-impacts-energy-transition-prospects-and-policies .

[10] .   Michaela Trippl et al., “Unravelling Green Regional Industrial Path Development: Regional Preconditions, Asset Modification and Agency,” Geoforum 111:189–197 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.016 ; Laura Corb, et al., “Climate Tech Competitiveness: Can the US Raise Its Game?” McKinsey and Company, October 3, 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/climate-tech-competitiveness-can-the-united-states-raise-its-game .

[11] .   Raghu Garud, Joel Gehman, and Peter Karnoe, “Winds of Change: A Neo-Design Approach to the Regeneration of Regions,” Organization and Environment 34:634–643 (2019), DOI: 10.1177/1086026619880342; Jeffrey Ball et al., “The New Solar System: China’s Evolving Solar Industry and Its Implications for Competitive Solar in the United States and the World,” Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, March 2017, https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-new-solar-system/ .

[12] .   Shinwei Ng, Nick Mabey, and Jonathan Gaventa, “Pulling Ahead on Clean Technology: China’s 13th Five Year Plan Challenges Europe’s Low Carbon Competitiveness,” E3G, March 2016, https://www.e3g.org/wp-content/uploads/E3G_Report_on_Chinas_13th_5_Year_Plan.pdf ; Asheim, Isaksen, and Trippl, op. cit., 17.

[13] .   David M. Hart, “Clean Energy Based Regional Economic Development: Multiple Tracks for State and Local Policies in a Federal System” (ITIF, February 25, 2019), https://itif.org/publications/2019/02/25/clean-energy-based-economic-development-parallel-tracks-state-and-local/ ; Kavita Surana et al., “Regional Clean Energy Innovation,” Global Sustainability Initiative, University of Maryland, February 2020, https://cgs.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2020-02/Final_Regional%20Innovation%20Report_2.20.20.pdf .

[14] .   Economic Development Administration, “$1B Build Back Better Regional Challenge,” accessed April 5, 2024, https://www.eda.gov/funding/programs/american-rescue-plan/build-back-better ; White House, “Biden-Harris Administration Announces 31 Regional Tech Hubs,” October 23, 2023, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/23/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-31-regional-tech-hubs-to-spur-american-innovation-strengthen-manufacturing-and-create-good-paying-jobs-in-every-region-of-the-country/ ; Economic Development Administration, “EDA Tech Hubs Phase 1 Fact Sheet,” October 2023, https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/EDA_TECH_HUBS_Phase_1_Fact_Sheet.pdf ; White House, “Biden-Harris Administration Announces Regional Innovation Engine Awards,“ January 29, 2024, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/01/29/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-innovation-engines-awards-catalyzing-more-than-530-million-to-boost-economic-growth-and-innovation-in-communities-across-america/ .    

[15] .   Robin Gaster, “The Hydrogen Hubs Conundrum: How to Fund an Ecosystem,” ITIF, September 12, 2022, https://itif.org/publications/2022/09/12/hydrogen-hubs-conundrum-how-to-fund-an-ecosystem/; Robin Gaster, “Why DOE Should Prioritize Transformational Investments in Industrial Technology,” December 19, 2022, https://itif.org/publications/2022/12/19/why-doe-should-prioritize-transformational-investments-in-industrial-technology/; Energy Futures Initiative Foundation, “Transforming the Energy Innovation Enterprise,” November 8, 2023, https://efifoundation.org/foundation-reports/transforming-the-energy-innovation-enterprise/ ; Noah Kaufman, “The US Needs a Playbook for Place-Based Investments in Fossil Fuel Communities,” Columbia University Center for Global Energy Policy, August 3, 2023, https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/the-us-needs-a-playbook-for-place-based-investments-in-fossil-fuel-communities/ .

[16] .   Cooke, op. cit. ; Jennifer S. Vey et al., “Assessing Your Innovation District: A How-To Guide,” Brookings Institution, February 21, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/assessing-your-innovation-district-a-how-to-guide/; Lachlan Carey and Aaron Brickman, “Accelerating Clean Regional Economies: A Great Lakes Investment Strategy,” RMI, September 26, 2023, https://rmi.org/accelerating-clean-regional-economies-a-great-lakes-investment-strategy/ .   

[17] .   Robert D. Atkinson, Mark Muro, and Jacob Whiton, “The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America,” ITIF, December 9, 2019, https://itif.org/publications/2019/12/09/case-growth-centers-how-spread-tech-innovation-across-america/ ; Economic Development Administration, “Tech Hubs Aim to Make United States a Global Leader in Technologies of the Future,” October 20, 2023, https://www.eda.gov/news/blog/2023/10/20/tech-hubs-aim-make-united-states-global-leader-technologies-future ; Economic Development Administration, “Notice of Funding Opportunity,” October 2023, https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/Tech_Hubs_NOFO_2_FINAL.pdf ? 5.

[18] .   EDA, “Notice of Funding Opportunity,” https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/Tech_Hubs_NOFO_2_FINAL.pdf .

[19] .   White House, “31 Regional Tech Hubs;” EDA, “Biden-Harris Administration Designates 31 Tech Hubs Across America,” October 23, 2023, https://www.eda.gov/news/press-release/2023/10/23/biden-harris-administration-designates-31-tech-hubs-across-america ; Economic Development Administration, “Tech Hubs: Benefits of Designation,” October 2023, https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/EDA_TECH_HUBS_Designation_Benefits.pdf .

[20] .   EDA, “Benefits of Designation.”

[21] .   EDA, “Notice of Funding Opportunity,” 33–37.

[22] .   M.P. Hekkert et al., “Functions of Innovation Systems: A New Approach for Analyzing Technological Change,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 74:413–432 (2007); Anna Bergek et al., “Analyzing the Functional Dynamics of Technological Innovation Systems: A Scheme of Analysis,” Research Policy 34:407–429 (2008).

[23] .   Office of the State Comptroller, “The Changing Manufacturing Sector in Upstate New York,” June 2010, https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/publications/pdf/manufacturingreport.pdf ; Susanne Craig, “New York’s Southern Tier: Once a Home for Big Business, Is Struggling, September 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/30/nyregion/new-yorks-southern-tier-once-a-home-for-big-business-is-struggling.html .

[24] .   “New Energy New York Coalition Members” accessed April 5, 2024, https://newenergynewyork.com/#coalition ; American Jobs Project, “The New York Jobs Project,” December 2018, http://americanjobsproject.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/The-New-York-Jobs-Project.pdf .

[25] .   Per Stromberg, interview, March 5, 2024; BingUNews, “This Is a Big Deal,” February 24, 2022, https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3495/this-is-a-big-deal-new-energy-new-york-stakeholders-meet-to-discuss-lithium-ion-battery-manufacturing-proposal ; Spectrum News, “Endicott Prepares for Resurgence,” September 26, 2022, https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/binghamton/news/2022/09/25/endicott-prepares-for-resurgence--here-s-how-they-got-here .

[26] .   “New Energy New York: Overarching Narrative,” https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/New_Energy_New_York.pdf ; New Energy New York, “Battery Tech Hub,” https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/New_Energy_New_York_Battery_Tech_Hub.pdf ; New Energy New York, “NSF Engines: Upstate New York Energy Storage Engine,” https://newenergynewyork.com/nsf-engine-upstate-ny-energy-storage-engine/ .

[27] .   Krys Merryman, “BMW’s $26B Impact on South Carolina Economy Still Growing,” SC Biz News, March 22, 2023 https://scbiznews.com/bmws-26b-impact-on-south-carolina-economy-still-growing/ ; Business Facilities, “Boeing To Consolidate 787 Production in South Carolina in 2021, October 6, 2021, https://businessfacilities.com/boeing-to-consolidate-787-production-in-south-carolina-in-2021 ; South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, “The Impact of Manufacturing in South Carolina,” April 2021, https://scfuturemakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SCManufacturingEconomicImpact.pdf .  

[28] .   Harry Lightsey, interview, February 20, 2024.

[29] .   SC Nexus for Advanced Resilient Energy, “Tech Hub Designation Application,” https://www.eda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-11/SC_Nexus_for_Advanced_Resilient_Energy.pdf .

[30] .   Ibid.

[31] .   “SC Nexus Webinar,” January 3, 2024, https://www.sccommerce.com/sites/default/files/2024-01/20240103_SC%20NEXUS_Webinar_vS_0.pdf ; Lightsey interview.

[32] .   Congressional Research Service, “Regional Innovation: Federal Programs and Issues for Consideration,” April 3, 2023, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47495 .

[33] .   EDA, “Notice of Funding Opportunity,”

[34] .   RMI, “Accelerating Clean Regional Economies: A Great Lakes Investment Strategy,” September 2023, https://rmi.org/accelerating-clean-regional-economies-a-great-lakes-investment-strategy/ .

[35] .   NSF, “Regional Innovation Engines Broad Agency Announcement,” May 3, 2022, https://new.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/regional-innovation-engines/updates/funding-opportunity-nsf-regional-innovation .

[36] .   Scott Andes and Alex Jones, interview, February 14, 2024; Joda Thognopnua, interview, February 22, 2024.

Editors’ Recommendations

May 28, 2024

US State and Regional Energy Innovation Index: State Dataviz

Us state and regional energy innovation index: regional dataviz, us state and regional energy innovation index: metropolitan statistical area dataviz, us state and regional energy innovation index: combined statistical area dataviz, us state and regional energy innovation index: metropolitan division dataviz.