Frequently Asked Questions

Company registration, terms & conditions, and policies

  • Craighead Kellas is a professional services consultancy registered in the United Kingdom (15995326) and in the United Arab Emirates (DSO-FZCO-39718).

    The company specialises in strategic and applied research ("SAAR") and provides it as outsourced research-as-a-service ("RaaS"). We make our services available on a subscriptions and projects basis, in clusters including advisory and fractional support, contextual and exploratory investigations, experimental applications, and technical assistance and capacity building.

    Our philosophy and principles (which you can read about elsewhere on the website) are centred around ideas of evidence, provenance, and the importance of distinguishing between objective and subjective approaches to fact and interpretation.

    Or, to put it another way, between wishful thinking and ground truth.

  • No. We have a strong interest in law, and we provide some services that fall within the scope of legal process outsourcing, including evidence digitisation, document review, e-discovery and legal research. But we do not undertake any regulated or reserved legal activities.

  • Yes. No. Maybe. Political risk is a broad church in the commercial world, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a common definition of what it means. Our work tends to be somewhere between foundational and speculative - hence the R&D framing - and can be used in many ways.

  • See above.

  • See above.

  • See above. Only in the broadest sense of the term, insofar as researchers are investigators and investigators are researchers, etc etc. We are not private investigators or detectives - but our work can and does complement and support what they do.

  • We're not engineers (in the professionally accredited and regulated sense of the term), and we don't design or build STEM hardware or applications.

    We're especially interested in the interface between technology and work that deals with information and knowledge. We develop tech in the sense of testing it out as lay users, anchoring it firmly to multiple possible contexts, and identifying use cases for it.

  • It’s short for “strategic and applied research” - our version of R&D.

    We developed it as shorthand for another set of acronyms from the wider world of research and experimental development (a.k.a. R&D), most of which tends to focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

    We cover the non-STEM part, and we like to think that that brings a lot of value to the world of technology innovation and development. The acronyms for non-STEM R&D include AHSS (“Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences”) and SHAPE (wait for it… “Social sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy”).

    We’ll be setting up a separate resource page on STEM and non-STEM R&D. Watch this space.

  • Research as a service.

    It's an outgrowth of the software industry's anything-as-a-service model. Technical and quantitative variants of it have caught on in a few other sectors.

    In-house research and analysis services are expensive to maintain, are often only needed on an occasional or part-time basis, and they don't always translate to immediate business bottom-lines.

    We keep it simple. It's research. As a service.

  • Craighead was a croft in the Easter Corries area of Moray, Scotland, for over 200 years. The rubble is still there today, a little more than a century after the premises were last vacated.

    Kellas is a town in the same region, and the surname of a family from which one Alexander Mitchell Kellas (1868-1921) was descended.

    Alexander Kellas is an important sigil for us. He was the foremost Himalayan mountaineer of his day and pioneered early medical research on high altitude physiology. He’s an obscure historical figure, partly by his own design: he kept no personal diaries, generally liked to keep his own counsel, and wasn’t big on self-promotion. He died on the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition of 1921.