Investigating and Solving Business Problems

Business is about solving problems. These could be customer problems, operational problems, market problems, financial problems or any other problem. Some problems are easily solved with a little effort but many require in depth explanations and understandings.

Businesses are like people in that if they ignore their problems they will compound and not be able to functional at their highest performance.

Consider a business that is top heavy and has a greater impetus to focus on its imbalanced structure but fails to work on the bottom line. While this may not seem like a problem when the organization is running well, it becomes a bigger problem later on as the organization can't keep up with the market.

Researching the process of decision making, salaries, structure and how these impact market performance could be beneficial. Each company and problem will be unique.

Researching business problems are conducted in a similar way to a scientific study. The researchers should come in with a single research question and not have any bias toward possible findings. As they begin to answer the pieces of those questions they come to understand the nature of the problem itself and adjust their focus until they have an adequate explanation and conclusion.

Research can be exploratory or quantitative; sometimes it uses both. When problems are not well defined it is beneficial to use exploratory methods but when the problem is already known, or found through exploration, a quantitative approach might be better to pinpoint a solution. Mixed methods are commonly used in the natural environment of business that can't be taken out of their context to study in a lab.