A combinatorial methodology, developed for the rapid optimisation of sputtered transparent conducting oxides, was applied to Si doped ZnO. A wide range of compositions have been explored over a single sample to determine an optimum composition, with respect to the minimisation of resistivity, of x = 0.65% wt. SiO2. A fundamental investigation of the conduction band non-parabolicity yields values of me0=0.35m0 and C = 0.3 eV-1 for the conduction band minimum effective mass and the non-parabolicity factor, respectively. The variation of extracted band gap values with respect to dopant concentration provided an estimate of the magnitude of re-normalization effects. A model is proposed to describe the carrier transport behaviour for a degenerate polycrystalline semiconductor by accounting for the tunnelling of carriers through grain boundaries.