I think the flight disruption of the past week has made a lot of business people rethink how they conduct their business given the wide variety of virtualization tools which are now available. Here are a couple of opportunities, given the type of business we are in at Haddock Research.
BACK-UP FOR MEETING DISRUPTION
Over the course of my career, I have had to give hundreds of research presentations - but sometimes things get in the way. My first ever public research presentation was set for October 16, 1987 when I lived in London - but was cancelled due to a huge storm. Other presentations did not happen due to an unexploded second world war bomb, the birth of our second child and some other more mundane reasons.
But the virtualization tools we have now means we don't have to face this risk. I live in Montreal and was due to speak at a conference in Birmingham, England today (April 21st), but the flight was cancelled. So, instead I worked on pre-recording the presentation on Brainshark - which allowed close collaboration with my UK-based business partner, James Ambler, and enabled stranded delegates to also view the presentation (and has had some press comment).
But I am sure there were other options using virtualization. I'd love to hear them.
CONDUCTING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
I have met with quite a few telepresence companies in the last year or so - mainly in connection with our section report on telepresence & flying. We have now launched a pharmaceutical research arm, with an agency called Virtual Pharma Research. A lot of qualitative interviews still involve researchers travelling all over the world, and I think there is still a good opportunity to provide effective virtual interfaces for qualitative group discussions and in-depth interviews. Do contact me if you would like to explore developing such a solution.
