The American business word for a finding worth acting on, and it has largely displaced finding, result and conclusion. An insight implies a consequence. The word itself carries the claim that something should now change.
Tech transfer
Every substantial American research university runs an office whose function is to move findings out of the laboratory into products and companies. It has staff, a budget, patent attorneys and revenue targets. Converting knowledge into use is somebody’s full-time job with a reporting line.
Land-grant universities
The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states federal land to fund colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts. Later legislation added agricultural experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service — agents placed in counties across the country to carry research findings directly to working farmers.
American higher education built a delivery system into its founding statute. The knowledge was required to reach the field.
Ivory tower
The American phrase for academic knowledge held apart from practical use, and it is not a compliment. It concedes that the tower contains real knowledge. The objection is to its distance from anything.
The executive summary
One page at the front, written last, containing the conclusion and the recommended decision. It exists because the person who will act on the report may not read the rest of it, and the document is designed around that possibility rather than against it.
Recommendations
An American report ends with them, and a report that ends without them is regarded as unfinished. The analysis is the middle of the document. What the reader should now do is the point of it.
The dashboard
American organizations build screens of live numbers, borrowed in name and layout from the instrument panel of a vehicle. A dashboard exists for a driver. Everything on it is there because it tells you to turn, slow down, or stop.
Business intelligence
American software vendors named an entire product category after the idea that data becomes valuable when it changes what someone does. Not data management, not information systems. Intelligence — a word borrowed from the military, where the whole point of knowing something is the decision it enables.
So what?
The standard American challenge to a presented finding, asked openly and without hostility in meetings. The question is not whether the finding is true. It is what follows from it being true, and a finding with no answer to the question has not earned the time.
Actionable
An American business adjective applied to information, and used as a test rather than a description. Is this actionable? Information that fails it is not called wrong or incomplete. It is called interesting — which in that context is a dismissal.