I think they key word in my post wasn't "structured" but "shows". Even if the occasion calls for 100% unstructured research (let's spend some time in the sandbox to see what we can do with some new software) it's a critical skill to be able to communicate what you learned during that phase with other people, even people with different job titles and backgrounds.

I suggested formalizing and structure as words because new features/products/projects are a common enough occurrence that we have standard procedures for it.