I work at the intersection of prototyping, investment, and ethnographic research. The quickest paths to the deepest insights on a topic is to try out an idea and see what happens. For new, emerging topics, this is a much more effective approach than simply surveying what exists.

These are business-shaped or project-shaped research projects that explore an emerging topic, usually a technology, by creating an idea or an experiment and examining first-hand how it can or can’t be built, and how it affects its environment.

You can think about it as “insights investing.” Whereas with impact investing, you invest and hope for market-rate returns, but hedge your investment with the impact you’re making, with insights investing you hedge your investments with the insights you gain. Often you may see little or no returns from the initial investment, but that is not the point–the point is the insights you gain that will lead to more intelligent strategies and projects in the future.

For instance, to learn about emerging media technology in frontier markets, I started www.afrivr.com with Silas Okwoche. Instead of interviewing people about virtual reality or surveying the business landscape, we went into the local markets with inexpensive VR/360 headsets to see how people would react, what price they would pay, how people would want to distribute, and more. We partnered with event planners, record labels, and architects and tried to sell them projects in VR and 360. This taught us far more about the future of emerging media than if we had simply asked questions conceptually.

Another example is JeremyCoin. Instead of simply asking questions or surveying the cryptocurrency space, I created my own currency and have spent time creating a social system around it. If the time I’ve put into it pays off in the end, and people begin using it regularly, it will be a plus, but more important is the conversations it has started around value, trust and personal branding. In addition, it is an incredibly cheap and risk-free way to explain to people how these technologies actually work and how they might use them. It is shaped like a business, but the purpose is research and understanding.

I do similar kinds of projects with machine learning, IoT, finance and many other concepts and technologies. If you’re interested in how action research and insights investing can help your organization innovate more effectively, contact me at jjkirshbaum@gmail.com.