Research repository
A research repository is the shared archive an organization keeps of its past research, holding plans, screeners, recordings, transcripts, reports and findings, so a team starting new work can see what has already been studied and build on it.
How it works
What goes in depends on who will use it. Researchers want the study materials, so a method can be run again; product managers and designers want findings they can search by product, feature or customer group. Some organizations add material from outside research, such as support emails and notes from customer advisory groups. Research operations usually owns it, and the tool matters: in Nielsen Norman Group's survey of over 400 practitioners, collaboration software was the most common home and the least satisfying one.
The same survey found most repositories young and slow to mature. Only 9 percent of respondents called theirs mature and thriving, and 29 percent said theirs had no owner. Adoption rose with age, from about a third of repositories under 3 years old reporting good adoption to 65 percent of older ones.
A worked example
Over 3 years, a telecom's 12 researchers ran 90 studies and kept the files on personal drives. The team moves them into one repository with a shared set of 40 tags and makes a search of it the first step of every new brief. In the next 6 months, 11 planned studies are narrowed or dropped because the answer was already there.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
A research repository that holds recordings and transcripts as well as conclusions gets both from each Pulse study, so a later reader can go below a finding to the interviews under it.