Capital One, the financial-services and banking firm, has embarked on a radical experiment in democratizing research, opening up its insights-gathering process to almost everyone in the company.
“When we talk about ‘empowering’ or ‘democratizing’ research, we’ve really gone into this full bore,” according to Philip Rhodes, Capital One’s director/design insight. The simple translation: Anybody in the enterprise has an open door not to commission research “but to do research themselves.”
Not surprisingly, Capital One’s decision to allow personnel not trained in the field to conduct their own research – and place it a centralized...