When I joined Talis in 2008, a number of my peers in the Semantic Web community commented on the fact that a relatively small company was employing recent Ph.D. graduates. Any development of this sort is a useful data point for gauging the commercial interest in a particular research field (not to mention a whisper of reassurance for those toiling on the rocky road through a Ph.D.!). But what seemed to raise the most eyebrows was that I was joining Talis as a Researcher. Everyone seemed to agree this was a pretty bold move for a company of our size.

So what’s in it for us? Why do we invest in research rather than increasing the dividend we pay to shareholders each year? We do this because we believe that we can be more successful as a company by investing in research, as a driver for medium- and long-term growth of existing strands of the business, and as a potential source of new areas of business we haven’t yet imagined.

Many people who have worked closely with us will know that we value innovation across all areas of the business, while recognising that this means different things depending on the maturity of the corresponding market. So if we value innovation across the business as a whole, why invest in creating a dedicated research team? Shouldn’t all teams be responsible for conducting their own research, as their work priorities demand?

There will always be a strong element of this at Talis, as many of our recent developments demonstrate (take Aspire and Kasabi for example). However, any researcher will tell you (as will anyone else who has to combine research with other responsibilities), conducting considered, rigorous, fundamental research requires certain freedoms that other teams at Talis don’t always have — their work is too important; freedom to explore new ideas without fear of failure, and freedom to dig deep into those ideas without distraction. Talis provides a superb environment for the former, and I’m working on my own abilities to deliver on the latter!

This highlights a fundamental contrast between Talis Research and my experience of research in an academic context (admittedly this is limited to my time as a Ph.D. student in the early 21st century, and is certainly no reflection on KMi and The Open University, one of the most supportive and creative research environments I’ve ever set foot in). At Talis we will need to spend significant periods of time with our ‘research attention‘ far closer to the coal-face than a typical university research group is used to. This can be unsettling if we measure ourselves in conventional academic terms.

The flip side is this: with no requirement on publications as a metric of success, unless we want them to be, we can free ourselves up to ask the questions to which we as a company want answers, safe in the knowledge that it’s the quality of the answers that matter, irrespective of the outcome.

Do we know precisely how to answer these questions, in this specific context? Do we know precisely how Research fits within the growing, evolving organism that is Talis? No. Not fully. But as we’re growing we’re working it out. This blog is the start of our account of the journey. We hope to see you along the way.

Tom Heath.