ITL Research: industry datasets, market intelligence and documented analysis

An independent research and data platform. We collect, structure and document data from public and authorised sources so that researchers, analysts, businesses and decision-makers can work with evidence they can trace back to its origin.

ITL Research is an independent project. It is not affiliated with Microsoft, SRI International, UNESCO, or the former Innovative Teaching and Learning Research programme.

What the platform does

ITL Research builds industry-specific datasets and the analysis that goes with them. We gather records from public sources and from authorised providers, resolve them into consistent entities and fields, and document what the data does and does not cover. Nothing is published without its methodology: every dataset ships with source information, coverage details, field-level documentation and practical guidance for use.

The work is deliberately unglamorous. Most of the effort goes into the parts that are invisible in a finished table: deciding which source is authoritative for a given field, normalising units and dates, resolving the same company or place appearing under different names, recording why a record was excluded, and writing down the questions the data cannot answer. That written record is what makes a dataset reusable by someone who did not build it.

What the project publishes

Curated datasets covering multiple industries, each released with a data dictionary and a method note.
Market and industry research — analysis of how a sector is organised, who operates in it, and how it is changing.
Data dictionaries and methodology notes — field definitions, units, permitted values, collection method and cut-off dates.
Historical and comparative analysis — how a market, category or dataset changed over time, and how far it is comparable across periods or regions.
Research reports and data-driven insights — findings written so that the underlying figures can be checked.
Custom datasets for specific research needs, scoped and documented to the same standard as published ones.

What every dataset includes

Scope and coverage: What is included and what is excluded, the geography and period covered, and the date the collection was cut off.
Source provenance: Where each field came from, whether that source is public or authorised, how it was retrieved, and when.
Field-level documentation: A data dictionary with types, units, permitted values and known gaps, so a consumer can tell an empty field from an unknown one.
Method notes: Normalisation and entity-resolution rules, deduplication logic, and what was decided when two sources disagreed.
Known limitations: Coverage bias, records that may be stale, and the questions the dataset cannot answer.
Guidance for use: Worked examples, the joins we expect to work, and a citation format for the dataset and its version.

How we work

Prefer sources that can be named and revisited over convenient but unattributable ones.
Keep observation separate from inference, and label which is which.
Publish the method note with the data, not on request.
Correct mistakes in public, recording the correction rather than quietly applying it.
Do not redistribute third-party documents or content we have no right to republish; reference them instead.

Historical materials on this domain

Before it became the home of this platform, this domain hosted the education research programme ITL Research — Innovative Teaching and Learning Research, announced by Microsoft Partners in Learning on 13 January 2010 and executed by SRI International. That site ran until 2016, and the domain then changed hands several times before it was acquired.

The programme's public materials remain available here as a documented archive, because it is the honest destination for readers arriving from decade-old citations, and because those documents are the origin of the name this platform uses. The archive is not this project's own research output, and no claim is made to it:

Notes on the 2011 research findings — what was measured across seven countries, and what the data supported.
21CLD and LEAP21 — the six learning-design dimensions and the 2012 rubrics, served under their Creative Commons licence.
Whole System Reform for Innovative Teaching and Learning — bibliographic note on the white paper written for the programme.
UNESCO Brasília 2014 — the conference talk on scaling professional development.
The report index — every historical document traced so far, with author, year and a lawful source.

Historical materials referenced on this website are provided for research and bibliographic purposes, with attribution to their respective authors and rights holders.

Independence

ITL Research is an independent project with no institutional sponsor, and no funding from or affiliation with the organisations named above. The historical archive describes documents written by other people, and every one of those is attributed to its author and rights holder. Where a document cannot be published here, this site describes it and points to a lawful source instead; every file that is served carries the basis on which it is made available.

About the project, the archive method, and the history of this domain →