Research is not all alike. Basic research, for example, simply tries to provide explanations for why things happen as they do, because explanations are key to understanding how the world works. Basic research provides explanations, but not necessarily solutions to problems, however. We could know the physiological cause of multiple scleroisis, for example, but that would not necessarily tell us what drugs or therapy would correct the situation. We can have a successful therapy without understanding basic causes, and vice versa.
Scholarly research is meant to be used by everyone, to be added to public knowledge.
Proprietary research, conducted for a particular organization's purposes, may be very high quality, but is not made public, because that would eliminate its value to the owner of this special knowledge. Describe the generic working model for research. The working, generic model for research is a series of steps or stages, working forward from asking key questions, to reconceptualizing the next studies. Research is cyclical, cumulative, question-oriented, and creative. Next, we have to operationalize our questions.