As you grow professionally, you need to focus your research interests; however, keep up your "ideas books" as research funding, interests, and focuses always changes. There is always a problem that one faces in deciding on a research emphasis. How narrowerly does one focus a research line? Certainly, knowing everything in the world about a broad topic offers special problems. If focused narroowly, one can do research with some degree of expertise. Unfotunately, my personally feeling is that foods, nutrition and food systems management problems frequently require an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Managing the balance between the extremes of being too focused versus being too broad is difficult and just requires experience.

Let's talk about the reality of selecting a research problem. Certainly, one has the option of deciding the broad area of research. For example instead of just food quality, one might focus on meat research, or vegetable research, or even potato research. It is critical that you have some idea of what your broad topic will be. After that, the press for funding and support may focus your ideas into particular channels. Great research ideas are only useful if one can undertake the research. Generally, this requires money. Even if all the research is simply sitting and thinking great and profound thoughts, you require money to live on. One can find out potential funding opportunities by first reviewing the research and seeing who supported the research for reported referred work. Another approach is to access the Foundation and the Government Grants and Proposals and see how close funding opportunities fall to your interests.

Over the years, a variety of research projects have come from my idea book.