The occupation of someone who comes up with and/or implements good ideas.
Research is presented in a sort of ominous and confusing way to most people. It's possible to graduate from university without having any idea what it really is. We hope that this page can save you the trouble of finding out through detective work.
There is a fine line between "research" and other sorts of work. However, the basic principal is: if it's not clear that something is profitable but you're working on it anyway, then it's research. If you're like many of us here and you love to tinker around with personal software projects, this just might be a very good career choice for you if you can handle the academic requirements.
The short version of these requirements is that you'll need to remain "in school" for about another 10 years after finishing your country's equivalent of American high school before you can start a research career without being someone's apprentice. This is the time it takes to get an UndergraduateDegree and a DoctoralDegree. For general information on formal education, see CategoryEducation.
Researchers are generally employed by either universities or industrial research labs. At a university, a researcher may be a professor, which usually includes teaching as well as research responsibilities; or a research scientist, which doesn't involve teaching but brings a somewhat lower status. An industrial researcher generally splits his time half-and-half between working on projects his employing company wants him to work on and projects of his choice.
It's researchers of these types that make up the mysterious process of "science." When you hear about "scientists," see them in movies, and things like that, what this almost always means is someone working in a university or research lab. Companies fund their research labs' projects partly to increase their public image as supporting scientific progress in general. Universities rely mostly on monetary grants from government agencies to fund specific projects. Through these mechanisms, a relatively small group of people works on advancing the frontiers of human knowledge while remaining blissfully apart from the workaday world.