For Tim O’Riley, research is a means of thinking, a way to generate a pool of knowledge or experience that can be drawn on, and a structure that can enable new ways of thinking and doing. It is a process of looking for something outside one's everyday orbit, whether that thing is an idea, a place, a phenomenon or a process. Research affords the possibility of not necessarily being subservient to the status of an outcome but can foreground the quality of the investigation. While outcomes are of undoubted value, research in this sense nonetheless remains important. One can still be subjective or objective, rational, irrational or unconstrained.