Having arrived at a solidly defined construct (in this case that of market orientation), we can start posing questions from a broader perspective:
- What are the main drivers of market orientation?
- What barriers are there to market orientation within your company?
- What are the key benefits of market orientation?
After you have examined the construct thoroughly, identify moderators (factors that affect the degree to which X leads to Y). Again, you need to consolidate responses from several rounds of interviews. Investigate also the reasons behind propositions.
- Why do you think X will being about the occurrence of Y?
Then think through your propositions and possibly combine some of them. You may, for example, discover that:
- Increasing R&D spending during recession improves company performance during recovery.
- Increasing operations investments achieves similar results.
Both these interventions can be termed as capacity building. Therefore, you can extrapolate and reach the conclusion that:
- Investment in capacity building during a recession leads to higher post-recession performance.
All this helps us to understand how people see the world and what mental models they operate on. According to the article by the INSEAD business school, you can use this method to generate new insights on various questions, e.g.
- What drives decisions of advertisers to allocate spending across social media channels?
- What drives decisions of representatives of venture capital to invest in fintech startups?
- What factors are relevant in hiring wealth managers in the banking sector?
-jk-