What are the costs for quality research?

• Many factors affect the costs of quality research beyond the price of the raw research materials.
• Sophisticated researchers use both TCO and ROI metrics to evaluate success.
• Researchers miss many opportunities to improve with a myopic focus on the immediate & tangible costs of research.

Quality research gives you the basis for making good decisions and adding to your company’s bottom line. But sometimes, it’s hard to justify the costs of research in the short term as you build up that return on investment (ROI). Ultimately, you need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) to see your true research costs vs. income.

When you think about your research ROI, take into account both the near-term and long-term financial benefits. Without research, decisions can be misguided and based on a feeling or hypothesis. Research, on the other hand, proves that the decision you are making is the best one possible to provide ROI.

Many professionals only think of the immediate tangible costs of research, such as, making a dataset or research report purchase. While asset purchases can be large, they are often the smallest portion of your research costs when you take a TCO viewpoint. To better understand your TCO for research, let’s take a look at the cost dimensions related to research.

Research assets

To make research in depth and collaborative, you need some assets to inspire your team. Research assets include datasets, tools and research reports. Depending on the research you’re doing and the size of your team, you can expect to invest $1,000-$200,000 for each research project.

Expertise

It’s easy to forget that the salaries for internal employees fall under your total cost of ownership for research as well. Plus, most organizations need some external experts to lend their know-how to the mix to tell a complete story and gain the knowledge you need to make a decision.

The salary for an internal expert once you factor in benefits can be as much as $100,000. Add in some external experts and you can count on this line item exceeding $100,000.

Marketing

Once you have the resources needed to generate research, you need to locate customers for your research. Whether that be internally in other departments in the company or your executive team or external clients in the case of research agencies, now you have to invest in marketing your services.

Even internal marketing can carry a cost, such as lots of emails, printouts, phone calls and drive-bys with your customers. A researcher can lose valuable time completing these aspects of research when they should be guarding their time for generating new insights, predictions and actions.

Distribution

Once you have clients set up through your marketing, you now need to distribute the work. This once again can take a great deal of time for researchers as you ensure that they receive the work and then that you provide updates on an ongoing basis. If you provide research services to many clients, this can be extremely time consuming.

Sadly, research isn’t timeless, which means re-distributing your research every time the industry or marketplace you cover changes or shifts.

Organization

Throughout a research project, you need a secure way to store and organize it. If you collaborate with others, you also need a place to store this information that they can access at any given time too.

Then when it comes time to reference your research, you can waste hours just trying to find that relevant previous work. Plus, relying on free services like Dropbox or Google Drive may or may not provide the security you need to protect your intellectual property.

Compounding

Most professional researchers and decision-makers work on a set of research themes over-and-over. This recurring research means you need a convenient way to access that data or risk reinventing the wheel each time you start a new project.

How do you ensure you don’t reinvent the wheel, keep the research fresh and constantly find new ideas without a central location for your research and easy way to organize it. 

Think about how often you have read a news article and realize there is nothing new in it. That’s probably because of a lack of central database for all journalists to know what has been covered and what hasn’t. The same can be true for researchers where you just don’t realize the work you are doing has already been done.

Coegil solves these marketing, distribution, organization and compounding challenges by offering the first combined research management application & marketplace for investment management. The platform offers researchers an easy way to secure their intellectual property, selling it to interest parties without ever doing one cold call or email and keep that information up to date at all times through an intuitive organization structure and design.

Learn more about Coegil and what we offer both researchers and decision makers.