Who does the work.
A small firm, deliberately. The people who ran expert research before AI, running it again with better instruments.
Russ Rosenzweig founded Vista Research and chairs it. In 1994 he helped build one of the world’s first expert networks, and in doing so helped create an industry that is now measured in billions. He has spent the three decades since on the same problem from every side of it: convening specialists, screening them, and turning what they know into something a decision-maker can act on.
He is based in Chicago. Vista Research is operated by Arete & Associates, LLC, an Illinois company.
- Prior work.
- Our people have convened panels of faculty from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, NYU and Northwestern for Fortune 500 engagements: multi-month portfolio and innovation studies running to eighteen named academic contributors. That is the standard of person we can put in a room, and the reason we are comfortable promising it.
How an engagement is staffed
Every engagement is led by a Research Director, a senior person who scopes the question, recruits and screens the Advisors, runs the interviews, and writes the synthesis. The Desk finds candidates and reads the record. It does not conduct the interviews and it does not write the brief.
Research Directors are engaged per project rather than carried as standing overhead, which is how a firm this size can put genuinely senior people on a question that lasts three to ten days. Every synthesis is reviewed by a second reader before it reaches a client. The brief is checked by someone who did not write it.
The standard behind a match
Vista draws Advisors from two populations, and holds each to a different, verifiable test.
Published authorities qualify on the record: peer-reviewed work that bears directly on your question, with citation history we can show you. Operating practitioners qualify on documented role and tenure: the plant manager, the category buyer, the regulator, the fab operations lead. Many have never published a paper and never needed to.
Vista’s expert network includes 9,200 vetted Advisors in the Society of Industry Leaders, every one of them attached to evidence we can produce on request, and a broader network of 275,000 available experts from 32 years in the expert network business. But most of the time the perfect expert is in neither group. We undertake rigorous research on every engagement to find the best and most qualified experts for the question, regardless of whether we previously knew them.
What we will tell you
If your question is better served by a one-hour call, we will say so and name the firms that do it well. If it needs a standing team for six months, we will say that too. We publish our price range, we publish our method in full, and every entry in The Library says where that method breaks.
That is not modesty. It is the only durable way to sell research: be the firm whose reports you can check.