DEFINITION OF RESEARCHResearch is often thought of in terms of a job or a task. Actually, research is aprocess having a specific type of outcome. Research is an orderly investigativeprocess for the purpose of creating new knowledge. Furthermore, the simple dictionarydefinition portrays research as “1. Scholarly or scientific investigation or inquiry; 2.Close and careful study”

Doing research in business management is vital as it helps a business plan for the future, based on what may have happened in the past. If carried out successfully it can help a company make informed plans on how to become more viable in its sector.If something has been unsuccessful, for instance, having carried out effective research may help a business avoid future failure. Carrying out research may also help a company decide whether now is the right time to expand into another city or whether it should apply for a new loan. It also helps a business determine whether a procedure should be changed or if more needs to be done to meet the needs of the customer base.Research in business management may come in different forms, depending on what a company is hoping to achieve. For example, if you are hoping to launch a new product on the market, do some market research to see if it would be a good idea. Certainly, seeing what works and what doesn’t will help a business owner have the knowledge to make informed decisions in specific areas of business. Some business experts agree that looking to the future of business is very much about looking at the past. The two are interlinked and by carrying out research you are more likely to see a positive outcome in your chosen objective. In business, making ill informed decisions may be very precarious as there may be too much money at risk or a company’s reputation may be put at stake.Research into business management can either be carried out by an individual by looking at historical research reports or it could even be outsourced. Regardless of how it is carried out, the benefits for the future of your business will be very clear to see.

The business world is becoming increasingly competitive due to rapid advancement of Internet technologies whereby many business organizations have incorporated the web as the new marketing channel to reach out for their stake holders in the global market, particularly the suppliers and the customers. Many companies are finding it difficult to sustain competitive advantage in today's markets as more and more new entries are competing in the same market segment, also known as the red ocean market which has become overcrowded and profits are thinning. With the looming of the possible recession facing the largest economy in the world and possibly the whole world, the future of business organizations look groom and many of them will finally collapse if nothing is done about it. So the big question how do the business organizations survive in such troubling time?I think the best strategy is to venture into something totally new, a market that nobody or very few competitors exist, a strategy which is now popularly known as the blue ocean strategy as advocate by W.Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. However, it might not be so easy to put the blue ocean strategy into practice, so the next best thing to do could be to think of new strategies which could give the particular business organization competitive advantage over the competitors, even in the traditional red ocean market. Irrespective of which two strategies above to be adopted by a business organization, a new strategic planning is the key for survival and success. Human capital is becoming very important now as the world economy is transforming into knowledge economy, where human intelligence can be used to generate useful knowledge which can tapped to bring profits to the business organization. For R&D facilities, one of the most important components is the Management Information system (MIS) which researchers can use some of the automation tools to conduct research. These automation tools are software that was cleverly designed to do data mining and to generate information and knowledge as well as to help the managers make decisions. Some of these tools are the Decision Support System (DSS)

and Executive Information System (EIS). Combining human intelligence and ICT automation tools, the business organization will be able to carry out effective research and would be able to produce innovative and creative ideas that will certainly help the organization to implement new strategies that will enable it to ride on the wave of change and push it to a greater height.

Conclusions

To an ever-increasing extent, modern management is adopting and applying quantitative techniques to aid in the process of decision making. The intelligent use of the appropriate tools can reduce an otherwise highly complex problem to one of manageable dimensions. The collection of these techniques has become loosely known as "decision theory," although there certainly is no such thing as an integrated theory of how to make decisions. Nevertheless, one would seriously underestimate the ultimate impact these methods are going to have if they are viewed as nothing more than a handful of tools that are sometimes used to solve particular types of problems. Indeed, there is a growing body of opinion that believes that the greatest impact of the quantitative approach will not be in the area of problem solving, but will rather be on problem formulation. It will radically alter the way managers think about their problems-how they size them up, gain new insights, relate them to other problems, communicate with other people about them, and gather information for solving them. Thus quantitative analysis could have a profound effect on the "art" of management.