Academic research questions are often more abstract than applied.
That is, they get at the underlying principles of a phenomenon.
Academic research usually requires extensive secondary research,
reading scholarly literature, and academic journals and books.
If you do primary research, as scientists do in labs,
you do so after extensive secondary research.
In work place research,
your goal is to find information to help you answer a practical question.
Should we replace our sales staff's notebook computers with tablets?
Workplace research questions frequently focus on improving a situation
at a particular organization.
These questions call for considerable primary research because they require
that you learn about your own organization's processes and
how the people in your organization would response to your ideas.
Different research questions require different research methods.
Once you have determined the question you need to answer, think about the various
research techniques that you could use to answer them.
For example, your research methods for finding out how a current situation
is expected to change would differ from your research methods for
finding out how well a product might work for your organization.
That is, if you want to know how outsourcing will
change the computer supported industry over the next 10,
20 years, you might search for long range predictions in journals,
in magazines and on reputable websites and blogs.
By contrast, if you want to figure out whether a specific
scanner will produce the quality of scan that you need, or
will function reliable, you might do the same kind of secondary search.
And then observe the operation of the scanner at the vendor's site
scheduled product demos at your site.