Pitching Research Lite: A Reverse-Engineering Strategy for Finding a New Research Direction

As part of a staged pedagogic strategy, Faff (2015, 2017) argue for the value of reverse engineering (RE) existing papers into the pitching research template. Extending this literature, the current paper outlines a “pitching research” “lite” procedure, founded on a basic RE strategy. Specifically, with the “PR lite” procedure, we argue that the novice researcher can increase the likelihood of finding a viable and worthwhile new research idea without necessarily “incurring the cost” of completing the full PR template. The goal of the current paper is to describe this “RE/PR lite” procedure and illustrate it based on one author’s own experience, focusing on the topic of “bank risk exposure” and the interaction with his research mentors (the other two authors).