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Insights function & business

Research ROI & insights value framing

21 indexed claims · 10 guests · peaked 2025-Q4

Research ROI & insights value framing

Overview

Across these conversations, a single organizational pressure surfaces repeatedly: the insights function sits on the cost line of the P&L and must continuously justify its existence in the language of return on investment. Guests from Haleon to the University of Georgia converge on a discipline of decision primacy — identify the specific business choice the research will shape before writing a single survey question, then measure impact not in deliverables but in traceable organizational shifts. What divides these conversations is not whether ROI matters, but how to argue it. Some guests emphasize quantification: even an imprecise dollar figure anchors budget conversations because logic is hard to argue with. Others focus on executive literacy — reframing the same finding in the distinct KPI language of each leader in the room. Both strategies rest on the same acknowledgment: researchers who cannot translate the value of knowing into the cost of not knowing will always lose.

From the corpus

  • AI use in research falls along a three-level intervention spectrum: no intervention (client query → automated answer; enables retrospective ROI tracking on tracking studies), moderate intervention (current state — AI gets you almost there on specific business cases), and full engagement (seismic shifts like tariffs or the iPhone where AI has no context and humans must step in). — Dave Ritter, Ep. 16 · cl-dave-ritter-015
  • The single highest-leverage 30-day action for a researcher seeking influence is to grab coffee with a non-research colleague — not the CFO, but somewhere reachable — and ask them to explain their role; the conversation costs nothing and reliably converts into broader business literacy and better questions later. — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-020
  • Researchers cannot fully prevent being asked to validate decisions made above their pay grade; the response is to change one's own process — generating insights that help the team make the best of an already-made decision while honestly indicating where it sits in the risk landscape. — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-016
  • When the alternative to research is a coin toss, evidence at lower-than-textbook confidence (e.g., 80%) is still better than nothing — researchers must be able to discern when 'good enough is good enough' tactically and when stronger confidence is required strategically. — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-022
  • Skipping market research means not listening to the customer your product is for; on a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the cost of a product launch failure is always multiple times higher than the cost of the research that would have prevented it. — Ernest Baskin, Ep. 48 · cl-ernest-baskin-022
  • Researchers should never lead with technology when designing tools, dashboards, or AI capabilities; the human and business context — who will use the tool, what they should and shouldn't do with it — must drive the design choices. — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-001
  • Executives with twenty years of experience confidently believe they know what customers want; researchers' value is the disciplined acknowledgment that no one truly knows, and the willingness to ask 'how far wrong could you go?' — Ed Kahn, Ep. 40 · cl-ed-kahn-013
  • Researchers should ask the business-impact question before any methodology question — if you cannot articulate the business decision driven by an answer, you probably should not run the study. — Tina Tonielli, Ep. 2 · cl-tina-tonielli-010

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Episodes in Research ROI & insights value framing

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