2010 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Winners Announced

3M, Communispace, Ipsos and Technoes honored by Next Gen Market Research at TMRE

I’m very excited today to announce the winners of the inaugural Next Gen Market Research Award for Disruptive Innovation in Market Research.

As many of you already know the call for nominations went out to the entire NGMR community of over 9,600 members as well as the market research community in general a few weeks ago.

My fellow NGMR advisory board and nomination committee member Gordon Morris, Global Insights at Manager at Sony Ericson, explained the need for the award quite eloquently:

The market research industry is, by nature, introverted, intellectual and risk averse. It is not given to exploring new techniques, but instead revises and refines existing techniques in an attempt to innovate… In an industry often lacking genuine innovation, it’s important that we recognize and celebrate those among us who achieve such shifts. In so doing we inspire the dreamers among us to find the next one.

Though the nomination period was short, the number and quality of nominations received probably makes this one of the most competitive awards in our industry. We narrowed the nominees down to 30 Finalists across three categories: Most Disruptively Innovative Agency, Client and Individual.

There is a lot of innovation going on in market research currently, and several nominations featured technologies from text analytics and neuroscience to social media monitoring. Thankfully, the second criteria of disruption helped us narrow these down a bit. We also had to consider the disruption or impact to market research as usual that the innovation might cause or in many cases had already caused.

That said, today during the outdoor luncheon at the beautiful Hilton San Diego Bayfront Waterfront Park at The Market Research Event (TMRE) I was honored to present this years’ award to the following winners in front of almost a thousand fellow market research professionals.

2010 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Agency Award

Communispace Corporation

Because of their pioneering work and continuing effort to introduce online market research communities and because of their clear disruption to ad-hoc research as usual, with now over a hundred clients.

2010 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Client Award

3M Corporate Market Research Team

For the way which 3M Corporation has adapted Do It Yourself (DIY) Market Research, created best practices around its use, and shared their approaches with the research community at large. Their efforts are changing not just the way market research is used at 3M, but also how suppliers are leveraged throughout our industry.

2010 NGMR Disruptive Innovation Individual Award

AJ Johnson of IPSOS

&

Sean Conry of Technoes

The Individual award category was the most difficult to decide on based on the number and quality of nominations. A joint nomination the ongoing collaboration between AJ Johnson of IPSOS and Sean Conry of Technoes, was chosen. Their collaboration has leveraged mobil data and GPS with unstructured data such as photo and text. They have also employed freely available third party applications to visualize this data.

Additionally, their work has challenged our methodological views in terms of the role respondents can and should play in research.

The NGMR Advisory Board and I congratulate all the winners!

@TomHCAnderson
[PS. For those of you at The Market Research Event tomorrow, the NGMR Award winners will all participate in the Next Gen Market Research panel at 11:05. There will be engaging discussion on the future of market research covering topics from DIY to Social Media Research, Text Analytics and Privacy.]