Conducting Scientific Research in companies: A new workflow model

As an innovative company specialized in chatbot builders, we continuously conduct researches related to NLP and AI. Originally, research has always been associated with research laboratories and academic institutes. Today, the case is different and research labs and companies work together to make advances in many different fields. Companies have proven their ability to produce strong research results.

In this article, we will be sharing our experience of how we manage our research team and how it interacts with the other teams. We present a methodology model for conducting research in companies. Note that the presented work could be applied in any innovative company regardless of its domain.

Research workflow

Now, we will focus on how the research part is organized. The whole workflow is represented in the following diagram.

Research origin

The first stage, entitled Research origin, is a very important step especially in companies as it aims at defining research axes and orientations. Such orientations should be in line with the company mid-term and long term evolution needs. In practice, we start by defining the scientific problem we aim to solve with our research work. Next, we study our product development ideas which can be proposed by any member of any team. We join the problems and the development needs to set clear questions and goals. We end this process by identifying the benefits of such work. This stage does not only help with setting a starting point for research studies but also prevents from wasting time and effort on developing ideas that won’t be of great benefit for the company and/or for the scientific community.

References

The completion of the previous process will lead to a clear goal and a precise research subject. Now, it’s time to explore the scientific landscape that surrounds the subject. To this end, we start by studying the bibliography in order to set a reference context and highlight theoretical and empirical scientifical materials justifying decisions to be made during development.

During this process, we can acquire knowledge about:

• the general theories on the research subject
• previous development experiences on the same issue
• the characteristics of the audience targeted by the research
• the characteristics of the concerned domain
• the existing approaches and strategies
• the principles, rules and maybe the laws that govern the design of the research idea

Once the bibliography has been established, it becomes possible to further elaborate the research idea by providing enrichments that literature has unveiled.

As we can see in the diagram, the reference step does feed all the next processes and continues to be performed until the end of the project. This allows being always up to date with the latest state of the art results.

Methodology

Now that the idea is clear and the state of the art is established, we can define the methodology which includes the methods and the tools to be used to bring to light the research idea.

First, we define which knowledge we should acquire and which skills we should develop. Next, we set the deliverables, deadlines as well the quality standards. An evaluation strategy is then set in order to specify which evaluation tools and frameworks we should acquire or create as well as the test sets. We also prepare a dissemination plan at this stage by spotting the upcoming scientific conferences and events on which we can validate our work and share it with the community. Finally, we check the availability of the data we need to set up our ideas so we get prepared for data collection.

Operationalization

The design step aims at defining the components and the links that lead to the development of our general model.
Then, we move to the realization which includes the implementation, the configuration, the test, etc. During the test & verification process, we iteratively refine our solution as shown in the diagram below which brings to mind the Agile methodology.

We create as many prototypes as needed to satisfy the final goals.

Results

Now it’s time to understand and valorize the results. We start with an analytical study which aims at :

• getting prepared to present the results by synthesizing all the work carried out until this point
• explain and justify all the choices made during the project
• identify a set of principles and conclusions of the research experiment
• compare these conclusions with the knowledge identified in the bibliography process (state of the art)

Such analysis can unveil some weaknesses of the solution. In this case, we go back to the previous process and update it according to the results. We continue working inside this loop (operationalization to results) until delivery of the Proof Of Concept (POC).

When the POC is released and the results are stabilized, we produce articles highlighting the progress of the process and the final results.

How to characterize a research work?

This whole process must meet the distinctive characteristics of a scientific approach! To know :

• holding an innovative character
• establishing links between the proposed solution and the bibliography
• theoretic justification for every choice
• rigorous analysis of the results
• opening up to research tracks beyond the current problematic
• publishing the results in scientific reports

Transfer Methodology: Industrialization of Research

Now that our research idea is validated, we move to the transfer process. By transfer, we mean transferring the research knowledge and ideas into concrete features in our product. The corresponding workflow is described in the diagram below.

The advanced research block stands for the research workflow described in the first part. The first thing to do in the industrialization step is to evaluate the research work from a practical point of view. The Research team, as well as the Pre-Prod R&D team, work together to check if the research is mature enough to be industrialized by :

• discover the scientific POC
• validate the vital hypotheses
• ensure the stability of the research idea
• verify the achievement of the level of customer satisfaction if we move to the solution industrialization

If the answer is NO :

The reasons of inadequacy are raised to the previous step (research team) and according to the reason:
- either we work more on the idea to improve it if possible
- either we move to another research problem

If the answer is YES :

We move to the pre-development process which aims at:

• specifying the main features inspired by the scientific POC
• implementing a development POC: a minimalist implementation of the research idea

After the pre-development phase, the POC (dev) joins the usual feature development lifecycle that we follow at Opla. In our case, we use Agile project management with Scrum.

Teams’ involvement in the workflow

The table below shows the involvement of the different teams in the described processes of the workflow. Despite the distribution of the tasks among the teams is very clear, anyone from the start of the process can participate at the end of the process and vice versa. This guarantees joint progress in the research and production axes.

So this was the whole workflow from advanced theoretic research to production. If you try this model on, let us know how it worked for you in the comments section.