Having established a baseline, you can then engage with specific audiences to deepen your understanding. These might be your colleagues, external subject matter experts (who you can identify during your literature review!), or members of the general public.
Within these interviews, you can present the strategic themes and innovation pathways that you have identified, and share your initial thinking around these issues. This will anchor your interviews and ensure strong focus—from there, you can let your interviewees share their insights and opinions.
Interviews can be conducted face-to-face, via videoconference, by email, or over the phone. In each instance, the nature of your questions and your motivation for the interview will shape how the engagement takes place. Perhaps you have a very specific set of questions for an established expert in the field? In this case, you can set out your questions head of time, and then discuss them in depth during the interview. Perhaps you want to probe the ways in which different stakeholders perceive the issue? In this case, you can open the engagement with a high-level question, and then let the conversation flow.
Regardless, the basic principles of informed consent should apply: clearly convey who you are, what organization you represent, if/how any personal information from the interviewee might be stored and/or disclosed, and why you want to elicit certain information. From there, you can request their consent to the interview—and, as appropriate, to the recording of that interview.
The interview process will generate a collection of details, observations, and opinions. All of these insights will inform your thinking about the strategic themes and innovation pathways that you identified in your baseline assessment. They may affirm your initial views of the challenge at hand, or cause you to shift course—in some cases, quite dramatically! Remain open and flexible, and prepared to adjust your views and pivot your potential solutions.
Furthermore, you should expect that different stakeholders will have different views. On contentious or complex issues, you will often find contradictory views. It is your task to sift through this information, understand the origins of differing perspectives, and determine how to take your idea forward.
Resources
How to conduct interviews: https://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art116/readings/guide%20for%20conducting%20interviews.pdf
Informed consent in ethnographic research: https://media.suub.uni-bremen.de/bitstream/elib/5274/6/Qualiservice_Informed-Consent_QS-WP-4-2021.pdf
Conducting research on sensitive topics: https://icjia.illinois.gov/researchhub/articles/conducting-research-interviews-on-sensitive-topics
