I’m sure you know by now that I’m something of a data wonk. That is, I love research.

I love research because it is the tool of science, which seeks to observe the world and to measure and explain what it sees.

But, of course, science is only as useful as the degree to which it remains connected to the real world. That is the real significance behind the phrase “fact based policy.”

On the one hand, it is possible to spend a lot of time and energy studying things that don’t matter. Except, of course, why would you? What would be the point?

On the other hand, you could spend just as much time and energy theorizing about things without bothering to consider whether your theories have real world applications. Except, of course, why would you?

There’d be no point to that, either.

The questions behind the questions we ask in the world of small business research, then, are: what matters and why and who gets to decide that and what is the criteria upon which that decision is based?

Except, of course, if nobody ever stops to ask those questions, then research becomes a lot of meaningless busy work, for reasons that I have written about before.

How much observation of actual small business operations occurs in the course of typical research? None at all, because most of the research is culled from administrative data sets. It’s usually cheaper to do the research that way but it is also much more likely to be meaningless.

Why? Because, too often, small business research describes what small businesses appear to be doing but not why they are doing that or even whether or not that is what they are really doing.

And that makes me wonder how truly useful those research projects and their conclusions really are.

I think maybe it’s time for the research to get away from the balance sheet stuff. Small and microbusinesses serve important functions that go far beyond their contribution to GDP.

It is more than past time for us to decide that those other functions matter, too.