Why is it important for me to explore unmet needs in a research project?

Once you’ve decided on a strategic focus for your project - half your problems have been solved! In other words, the next important step is to put some ‘meat around the bones’ of your strategic focus area. This could look like a range of things, from planning discrete work modules to mapping out equipment, consumables, resources you need, to just about anything!

An important consideration at this point should be to explore the unmet needs faced by people who are relevant to your research topic. This should be aligned to the strategic focus of the project.

There are a number of ways to explore unmet needs and there is never a single right or wrong approach. These ways can also be used in combination and should always be combined with detailed literature studies and due diligence. The library is a wonderful resource and should be used as a great place to start.

As to needs exploration ideas, consider the following approaches:

  • Meeting with and speaking to real people (with real problems)
  • User surveys
  • Focus groups
  • Consultation sessions
  • Observational studies
  • End-user workshops.

All of the above approaches can provide you with a simple way to unpack the research problem meaningfully – remember, the problem might not be what you think it is! In fact, as research innovators you may have been engaging with a particular topic/area of study for a long time, and this may mean that you have a certain bent for viewing things with that lens. This is natural, and it happens to all of us! Focus can be a great thing in the long-term, particularly in the phases of the project when you are called on to provide specialist skills to advance the research. In the starting needs exploration phase of a research project however, it’s important to question your assumptions and to embrace new and different ways of thinking.

Begin with an open-minded position and be conscious that there are always three versions of the truth – yours, mine, and what the truth actually is! This will help you to develop a better understanding of the unmet needs in your research problem area, giving you the creative confidence to develop a research statement which is based on logic and the real mix of factors faced by people.

In a research project, it’s important to develop solutions that are directed to real problems. For a number of reasons, this is a vastly better proposition than to come up with a set of solutions and then trying (rather uncomfortably) to retrofit them onto a problem.

Starting with the right set of unmet needs means that you acknowledge that your chosen area of research is currently faced with several ‘gaps’, which are also ‘opportunities’ to make a change. In acknowledging this, you set the tone for your research project to be directed to solving that real and pressing problem. During your research project, you will hopefully come up with great new findings leading to publications to advance your research. At the same time, you might develop potentially commercialisable innovative outputs that can form a suite of intellectual property assets.

These commercialisable outputs can significantly benefit the people who have unmet needs (the very people you began exploring this translational research journey with) and in turn, they can be developed into products and services leading to an outsize impact for Australia in the global commercial arena. This area of activity is vital for ensuring the sustainability of our economy, and also for the good of our people – who stand to benefit from jobs creation and participation in a thriving, robust and prosperous nation.

It all begins with exploring the right unmet needs. Asking the right questions.

When in doubt, dial back to a simple two question test:

  • “Is my research project based on a real unmet need?” and
  • “Is this a real problem?”

Take a bit of time with this process, because it's useful to be able to work with confidence on a properly identified unmet need. Having said that, be unafraid to test the unmet need, as many times as you need to, along the way – introducing academic and intellectual rigour into the entire research problem set-up process. Being able to re-iterate the identified unmet need means that you are responding to practical requirements and are more likely to produce outputs that align to market needs and sentiments.

Of course, carrying out deep due diligence early on in the process will mean that you capture the fundamentals correctly and early on, and might need to revise less from your list of identified unmet needs later on.

There is never a clearcut roadmap, and that’s what makes the translational research and innovation journey so super exciting.

This article was written by Shama Kazmi, MIME Project Manager. With a background in medtech IP commercialisation and Biodesign, Shama is passionate about supporting medtech research innovation teams to succeed in their translational journeys.