Note Taking

The whole goal to note taking in industrial/market research is to summarize months of work into a 5-7 minute speech. A series of steps can help make a convincing argument.

Step 1: Develop a coding system to uniquely identify each article you gathered.

Step2: Use an Excel file (or some other program) that acts as a central file that links to all your data. I use an excel file that "hyperlinks" article names to its respective pdf and any notes on that article

Step 3: A business exists because there is a need in the market. It begins with a statement, "I believe there is a need in market X for product/service Y." Once the statement is made, there are questions that logically flow out such as:

• "What is your target market?"
• "Who are the key competitors?"
• "How are they doing?"

To answer these questions, I build a set of "framework files." These are files that will categorize general aspects of your industry. I started with 13 and then trimmed my list to 9 files:

1. Client Motivators (what motivates the client to buy)
2. Client Perceived Concerns (what does your client worry about your industry)
3. Client Realized Concerns (what disadvantages has your clients received from your industry)
4. Client Task Analysis (if the client is a specialized group like doctors)
5. Perceived Benefits (what does the client think about the benefits of your industry)
6. Realized Benefits (what have clients gained by actually using your competitors' products)
7. Client Trends (what are the changes in your client's behavior)
8. Industry Trends (what are the changes in the products of your industry)
9. Government Trends. (are their any laws, agencies, programs, or standards that promote or prevent your product)

Each of these files is a Word Document with Subheadings (For example, for Client Motivators, I have subheadings "Carrots" and "Sticks"). These Subheadings will be industry-specific just as your framework file names will be.

Step 4: When you read a particular article, you will be faced with 2 contradictory tasks: 1)be focused on the article, 2)keep the mind open to where if fits among the Framework Files. "Be focused on the article" means to focus on the details, take-home messages, and the relationships mentioned in the article. To say "keep the mind open to the Framework Files," means to be aware of how the details fit in your general scheme.
Be Careful: When one reads articles, there is a tendency to over-think about how the information will be used in the general scope of the project. Their brains get fried trying to compute all the interconnections of the data and they get paralyzed: paralysis by analysis.

Code your files so they can be linked to their respective articles. Every note should be able to be traced to its source. If your note is a reference to another article inside its bibliography, devise a coding strategy to accommodate it. After the you finished the notes for a given article, you should be confident to rely on your notes and rarely needing to open the original article

Step 5: Distribute the data from the notes into the files created in step 3 (framework files).

Step 6: Clean up the Framework Files (remove repetitive points but keep the references). Perhaps you want to reduce the framework files or add a new one

Now you have successfully parsed the important data into relevant places. You can now see if you are ready to move on to the next step: Writing the Business plan