Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half a billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing.’
This same freedom applies to scholarly practice also, including how we conduct research, disseminate results, and teach. This ‘just do it’ approach can adopt a term from software development: ‘guerrilla research’. Unger and Warfel (2011) argue persuasively for it, claiming that ‘Guerrilla research methods are faster, lower-cost methods that provide sufficient enough insights to make informed strategic decisions.’
Guerrilla research has the following characteristics:
- It can be done by one or two researchers and does not require a team.
- It relies on existing open data, information and tools.
- It is fairly quick to realise.
- It is often disseminated via blogs and social media.
- It doesn’t require permission.
As stated, guerrilla research needn’t be in competition with formal, funded research. In fact it’s a good way to get started on this. If a researcher needs to demonstrate to a funder that a project is worth investing in, then being able to show some interesting preliminary findings is useful, as is the ability to demonstrate through illustrative analytics that the blogs and tweets of their initial findings generated a certain level of interest.
Some of the inherent waste in current practice often goes unnoticed, because it is accepted practice that academics have been enculturated into. For example, some researchers can spend considerable time, months even, developing research bids to submit to funders. Stevenson (2013) calculated 3 months for a proposal,
