The edges of things

Suddenly, everyone is doing research. Designers are doing it. Product managers are doing it. Sales teams are doing it. People who used to consume insights are now creating them. Research is showing up in new roles, new teams, and places we wouldn’t necessarily have called “research” before.

So what happens to research when it no longer belongs to researchers? It means research is bigger than the methods, deliverables, teams and job titles we’ve used to define it.

Brooke will explore what changes when we think about research as a skill that can move around an organisation, rather than work that has to live within a particular discipline.

Drawing on parallels from design, a field that has been grappling with its own increasingly blurry boundaries, we'll ask what we might gain by loosening our attachment to who owns the work and what it produces. And what becomes possible when we define our value less by the work we do ourselves, and more by what we enable others to do.