Avoiding GIGO: Learnings from data collection in innovation research

Abstract This paper follows a research project meant to focus on understanding how universities and public research organisations (PRO) collaborate with firms in order to innovate and develop products or services using the same technology, an invention called Controlled Radical Polymerisation (CRP). We say ‘meant to’ quite deliberately as this project was plagued with a range of data collection issues. We aim to give the reader a sense of the complications our research team faced as we share and highlight the issues we did not properly consider in the process of collecting our data, and the strategies we implemented to save the project and collect useful data. These issues included the benefits of the choice of a face-to-face methodology, using our own networks to recruit participants, the underestimated influence of secrecy when collaborating with industry on an innovation project, the value of having a “local champion” and having specific procedures in place for operational matters; but most of all the importance of being flexible and agile. We share the lessons we learned during this journey. Importantly, we seek to give some practical advice and a sense of the reality of data collection – a reality which is often smoothed over and written up as unproblematic in academic publications.