Research methods are critical to the process of addressing business challenges and finding solutions. Research methods and experimental design can be used across multiple disciplines to help you answer questions and inform decision making. In order to do so, it is essential that you ask the right questions, identify and use the tools that will gather rich data sources, analyze the results using statistical and coding strategies, and apply visualization techniques to illustrate and represent the findings.

Drawing on business analytics, this course will use a scientific approach to introduce the concepts, tools and skills that are critical to designing and executing experiments to solve business problems. The process of using research methods to ask questions, design experiments to test a hypothesis, identify data collection methods and techniques, and analyze the results to find business solutions will lead to more informed decision making. Using the scientific method, this process involves gathering data, determining what to do with it, and deciding how to visualize and illustrate what you have learned.

This course provides an overview of the scientific method within the context of solving business problems with the goal of introducing the key concepts, tools, and skills for practice. This course will also introduce the critical human aspects, including team composition and the soft skills that will help you to communicate the findings and publish your results. To apply the concepts learned, examples will be introduced throughout and a case study will be used to summarize the course.