Why market research teams must rethink how they access expertise
Editor’s note: Shelli Pavone is co-founder and president of Inlightened, Boston. Pavone has more than 20 years of commercial experience in health care, and a history of developing sales strategy and teams from the ground up. Find Pavone on LinkedIn.
COVID-19 proved that when the right experts are at the table, innovation can move at unprecedented speed. Think of Operation Warp Speed, where organizations like HHS, ASPR, the FDA, CDC, NIH and DOD came together to radically accelerate vaccine research, development and approval. The rapid expansion of telehealth is another example, as clinicians, regulators and technology leaders united around a shared need to move from pilot programs to mainstream care almost overnight.
It wasn’t the pandemic crisis itself that created change. That was just the catalyst. The real accelerant was access to the right expertise early, continuously and in real time. But outside a global emergency, most organizations still struggle to access that level of rapid, high-quality expertise. As companies race to validate ideas, pressure-test assumptions and bring new products to market faster, traditional research timelines and general-population feedback aren’t enough.
We know fast, expert-driven innovation is possible. So why is it still the exception rather than the norm in everyday research and product development?
Traditional research models are being outpaced
Compressed competition cycles, increased complexity, tighter capital constraints and rising consumer expectations have fundamentally changed how quickly organizations must move. At the same time, the markets they operate in are more complex, interconnected and regulated than ever before.
Legacy market research models were built for a more linear, predictable market. They rely on sequential stages, lengthy recruitment cycles and broad-based samples that prioritize scale over specificity. While effective for tracking and trend measurement, these approaches often struggle to deliver timely insight when decisions depend on highly specialized or influential experts.
Today’s innovations must be evaluated through multiple lenses simultaneously. In medical research, those include areas like clinical workflow, regulatory compliance, population health impact, demographics, reimbursement dynamics, safety considerations and technical adoption. When research is siloed or delayed, teams are forced to make assumptions across these dimensions without sufficient expert input.
Without early and sustained access to the right expertise, organizations risk overlooking safety implications, misjudging adoption barriers, missing regulatory or evidentiary thresholds, and investing significant resources before uncovering avoidable roadblocks. The result is slower progress and higher risk.
Expert networks as an emerging research tool
Organizations cannot possibly be expected to keep a team of specialized experts on their payroll for every unique scenario that arises. Imagine a data analytics company that is developing a new tech product for interventional cardiology. They might need the input of interventional cardiologists in the U.S. who had performed at least 10 TEER procedures in the past 12 months, but they are unlikely to have a ready-made group of those on hand.
Expert networks offer a way for research teams to tap into that type of feedback within days instead of months. These networks provide structured, on-demand access to individuals with highly specialized, real-world knowledge. That means research teams can easily meet highly specific criteria, like recent procedural experience or decision-making authority, without months of recruitment.
Networks may offer new ways to:
- Validate scientific, clinical and technical assumptions earlier.
- Grasp diverse perspectives of a process’s varied stakeholders.
- Identify potential risks or unintended consequences before trials or pilots.
- Assess real-world workflow compatibility.
- Understand regulatory, policy and reimbursement considerations.
- Access multidisciplinary perspectives without months of recruitment.
Expert networks augment research, helping to accelerate breakthroughs and find new solutions that would not be possible without that collaboration.
How health care innovators are applying expert input
It is easy to describe new ways of accessing expertise in theory. While the need for experts reaches beyond the health care industry, the examples within health care research below show how this approach works in real research settings.
An obesity therapy launch team was trying to anticipate launch barriers across the perspectives of health care providers, payer stakeholders and policy decision makers. Through an expert network, they spoke with representatives from each of these perspectives in parallel. Accelerated feedback gave the organization time to adjust their assumptions and strategy early in their pre-launch strategy.
One cyclical use case is making inventory decisions around new technology. In order to understand how many mRNA vaccines to produce in a rapidly changing market, the production team spoke directly with pharmacy executives responsible for inventory and distribution to understand how the new technology would be evaluated in real-world settings. These conversations generated invaluable insights into operational realities that would not have been visible through broader samples.
In an oncology application, the development team was trying to access a very specialized group of practitioners who could weigh in on non-small cell lung cancer. An expert network allowed scheduled time with vetted, top-tier treating oncologists and nationally recognized KOLs. This influenced early stage positioning and helped ensure the final product met the actual needs of the end user.
Across these use cases, the pattern is clear. Research teams are being more deliberate about who they engage, why those perspectives matter and how quickly insight needs to inform decisions. By aligning expert input to specific questions and real-world roles, teams can move faster without sacrificing relevance.
Accessing expert voices in market research
We don’t need a global crisis to change the face of product development; we just need to think outside the box. In an environment where timing and accuracy increasingly determine success, the ability to engage the right perspectives at the right moment is becoming a core requirement for modern market research. It’s still the exception not because it’s unrealistic, but because most research workflows haven’t been designed to make that kind of access to expert voices routine.