Sabbatical Research
To pursue your dream...
Anyone taking a sabbatical, planning a career change or wanting to do academic research, may need a temporary website until their idea takes off. To involve a wider community, you may need to explain your ideas and present feed-back, conduct questionnaires or provide contact details for individuals matching the right criteria. To find rare individuals knowledgeable on a precise subject, you might need key words sitting in search engines, to draw them to your site.
Sites like SurveyMonkey are good for free and targeted surveys, but what questions should you ask? First come interviews to dispel your own misconceptions. Then you can ask the right questions and not naively miss those, soon to be obvious, follow-on questions.
The British Design Council seeks to support good ideas through to manufacture, improving society through innovation. Unfortunately, your hope might be curtailed, if your design, which is winning praise from all who encounter it, is deemed not different enough. Or predictions of unit sales might not be enough to translate probably profitable into a commercially viable and financially safe venture. Percentages for the inventor also seem low.
Sabbatical-Research is an oppportunity to get your idea to market.
To transform an idea into a workable solution, do you need to ask questions? Or find skills?
To build a potential customer base, through whom your product will get free advertising, do you need to engage with the target audience? Would this help if you eventually need venture capital, or to persuade a manfucturer to give your idea a free trial run at their expense? (See the history of the Mio Alpha Heart Rate Monitor)
Do you need to let collaborators login and report back, or to view progress charts, statistics and comments from other researchers or beta testers?
Most research projects are open to the world, that is the point. However some topics, may be adversely influenced by vexacious individuals. To protect genuine research into contentious issues, access to questionnaires can be restricted to the target audience. The URL or URLs that you give out, can act as the keys to a hidden part of the site. Privacy ensured, anonymous honest answers acquired with less filtering required.