Where Discovery is the phase, research is the practice that feeds it. This MOC collects how research gets planned, run, analysed and turned into something a team acts on. It is deliberately broader than discovery: research also serves evaluation, and it runs continuously rather than only at the front of a project.
Research is exploratory by nature - it goes looking for what is there. That is the line against experimentation, which starts from a clearly defined hypothesis and sets out to test it.