What's the question?

Finally getting the chance to start this personal project in earnest, after several months of being pushed to the wings. I have but 3 weeks to do an independent project from start to finish -- starting with nary an idea of the question but simply a topic.. nay, a category.

The idea of this project is to explore an idea and see what may come of it. The hope is that something shiny and sparkly enough will spring from the nothingness and become one of the large projects that our group subsists on. These shiny sparkly ideas come few and far between -- and the pressure is on for true inspiration and pecuniary viability.

The difficult thing presently is in even defining the question. I'd say for a 3 week project one should have the end goal fairly well in mind, and work tirelessly to find the right answers. But I don't know what the questions are yet, I don't know what metrics I want to measure my success by, I don't know what resolution this unformed patch of the ether needs to evolve into in order to have it lure the buy-in in three short weeks... I don't know a great deal of things. My mind map is a spread of small, isolated thoughts, a lot of maybe this and maybe that and having little clue how one should start and leap frog to the rest. And yet because of time and money, I currently believe a clear and decided plan is essential.

I have identified a few clear must-haves and constraints to the system -- I know who I want to at least reach as potential customers, who I at least want to rope in as collaborators, what I want tested, some ideas I must prototype, but how all these come together is a blur. My biggest difficulty now is actually both using this time period to optimize for Science and for Marketing -- deep enough for the research question and broad enough for scoping opportunities for buy in. For one, I think they engage entirely different parts of my brain, one analytical one lateral. Then there is yet the administrative side of it, what forms to write up, what procedures to put in place, what requests to get going in order to achieve objectives I have yet to even craft.

In short, this is a blur. I wrote down several possible directions under a few headings, that try to give a vaguely MECE breakdown of the tasks ahead, but I am clueless as to how to sort the importance of each item and down what road I should travel for a breakthrough. I have an "idea book" that I'm just going to scribble in until something comes out of it. Action/Perception cycles.. maybe I can perceive from my arrant ramblings?