How to Cut Research Time in Half Without Sacrificing Quality

R&D teams are likely spending half their week just finding and preparing the information they need. According to IDC’s 2018 study, data professionals dedicate 30% of their time searching for data and another 20% duplicating work. If you think your team isn’t affected by this, think again.

When GreyB spoke with 100+ R&D professionals, the verdict was clear: traditional information retrieval is broken. It’s slow, overwhelming, and a constant frustration.

The issue isn’t your team’s skillset. It’s the broken system of accessing information that’s holding them back. The real question is—how much longer can your team afford to waste hours on a broken system?

The Problem with Conventional Information Retrieval

Think about where your R&D team gets their data:

• Research papers
• Patents
• Conference proceedings
• Product literature

These are all critical sources. But the challenge is they’re scattered across search engines, professional databases, and internal company libraries. Each of these sources comes with its inefficiencies:

• Search Engines: SEO manipulates what you see. The most relevant information is often buried under content designed to rank, not inform.
• Professional Databases: Great tools if you have a PhD in querying syntax. Otherwise, your team may struggle to extract actionable insights efficiently.
• Internal Libraries: Many companies’ internal repositories are disorganized and poorly maintained, making it time-consuming to locate the right information. 

The result? Three major problems:

1. Cognitive Overload: Your team spends hours sifting through irrelevant data.
2. Steep Learning Curve: Getting started with these databases is daunting.
3. Slow Retrieval: Time that should be spent innovating is lost chasing the right information.

What does this Cost You?

Let’s talk about the actual price of inefficient information discovery. It’s not just wasted hours, but it’s opportunities slipping through your fingers.

Here’s what’s really at stake:

• Delayed Innovation: Inefficient information discovery slows innovation. Delays in accessing critical data extend product development timelines by 20-30%, costing companies millions in lost revenue potential.
• Duplicate Work: A TechLink study found that 84% of companies turn only half or less of new product or service ideas into budgeted projects. This suggests inefficiencies and potential duplication in the R&D process, indicating that a significant portion of R&D efforts is redundant and leading to wasted resources.
• Gaps in Strategy: Missed insights due to fragmented information systems leave your R&D roadmap vulnerable to blind spots. Enterprises lack the necessary clarity and agility in their R&D strategy, which results in isolated R&D efforts that are disconnected from corporate priorities and out of sync with the speed of business. This misalignment leads to strategic gaps and missed opportunities.
• Losing Competitive Edge: Competitors with efficient information discovery platforms can accelerate their R&D processes, leaving less efficient organizations struggling to keep up. This disparity results in lost market share and a diminished reputation as an industry leader.
• Longer Time to Market: Every delay in finding the right data adds up, slowing product launches. On average, inefficient research processes can add 6–9 months to a product’s development cycle. This can translate to millions in lost revenue in industries like pharmaceuticals or technology.
• Budget Overruns: Inefficiency isn’t cheap—it eats into your bottom line. A report by the EU Commission estimates that improper data management in research costs the European economy €10.2 billion annually, highlighting the financial impact of fragmented information systems.

So, What’s the Fix?

You need a system that doesn’t just collect information, but transforms how your team works. Here’s what the perfect solution looks like:

1. Comprehensive: All your R&D resources including research papers, patents, conference proceedings, and internal documents are consolidated into one centralized platform. No need to switch between multiple platforms again to retrieve information.
2. Tailor-Made: A solution designed to fit your team’s specific workflow, with customizable filters and intuitive dashboards that surface the exact data you need, when you need it. For example, a system that prioritizes industry-specific patents or research papers and automatically excludes irrelevant results saves hours of manual work. 
3. Proactive: Instead of passively retrieving information, your system delivers relevant insights before realizing you need them.
4. Intelligent: Advanced AI that understands your research intent. Clustering similar patents, organizing research themes, or identifying gaps in existing strategies filters out the noise and presents actionable insights. For example, instead of wading through thousands of search results, your team gets a refined list of the top 20 most relevant patents or papers.

With a system like this, R&D teams save time, work smarter, innovate faster, and stay ahead of the competition. The future of R&D efficiency doesn’t solely depend on working harder; it’s more of empowering your team with tools that amplify their expertise.

How Slate Can Help Cut Research Time in Half

Slate is a structured database designed to streamline proactive R&D. It collects, organizes, and centralizes all critical research within your field, ensuring R&D teams have the resources they need before they even realize they need them. Here’s how Slate revolutionizes your research process:

Organized knowledge with structured database

Most databases are bloated with irrelevant content. Slate’s structured database centralizes patents, research papers, industry reports, and internal documents in one intelligent hub. With intuitive categorization and powerful search capabilities, your team can locate the most relevant information instantly, cutting research time significantly and reducing duplicate efforts.

All research documents are organized in a structured, multi-dimensional taxonomy, making navigation intuitive and aligned with the research field’s key areas.

This is how Slate’s packaging database is structured in different clusters. Each clusters is categorized in various sub-clusters and so on to give you very narrow data for your research:

Stay ahead with proactive insights

Instead of reacting to industry shifts, why not anticipate them. Slate provides proactive insights in your research domain before you even request them. By continuously monitoring industry shifts, patent landscapes, and competitor activities, Slate equips your team with the foresight needed to act before market trends evolve.

Accelerate research with AI-powered discovery

Finding relevant insights manually is time-consuming. Slate’s AI-driven discovery tool cut through the noise, identifying emerging trends, relevant patents, and key literature in seconds. Whether you’re mapping tech landscapes, uncovering competitor moves, or exploring cross-industry solutions, just ask in simple language and find results in minutes.

Lets ask Slate “What are the developments in sustainable packaging in alcohol?” It provides a precise, data-backed response from patents and research papers.

Slate extract, synthesize, and summarize key findings from technical literature in minutes. It provides information in tabular form for easy comparison of research.

Break down silos with seamless collaboration

Research often involves multiple teams spread across different locations. Slate is your team’s central knowledge hub, ensuring insights flow freely across departments, reducing bottlenecks, and aligning teams. Shared workspaces allow R&D teams to share key insights, research findings, and patent reviews across departments globally.

The Bottom Line

R&D doesn’t fail because of inefficient teams. They fail because they’re trapped in slow, outdated systems. With the right system, you can eliminate wasted time, reduce costs, and unlock your team’s full potential.

Slate is designed to do exactly that. From integrating all your R&D resources in one place to leveraging AI for research discovery and getting actionable information instantly, our solution empowers your R&D team to speed up the research process.