Insight Innovation Exchange 2013

By Aaron Reid
October 15, 2013
IIEx in Philadelphia was a stimulating event. Innovative researchers and practitioners from across the globe gathered to share, and sell, ideas and inspiration to the industry.
I found the energy in the rooms and hallways to be highly charged. This electricity bodes well for the industry if these innovations do indeed traverse the product adoption curve. There has been an outpouring of positive emotion following the conference. We shared in that emotion, and upon further reflection we think it is important to start discussion on ways in which we can raise the level of these exchanges to new heights. Here are a few observations from the conference with that goal in mind.
1) A deep passion exists for altering the course of our industry. Lenny Murphy deserves a lot of credit for gathering this critical mass of energy. As a group, if we direct that energy toward sharing innovation ideas and solutions this mass may gather enough force to shape the way our industry is viewed and used in the future. This is welcome and necessary in order for MR to stay relevant in business. However, the big if in that statement requires the open exchange of ideas and solutions, not merely the selling of our own solutions to the enterprise clients in the audience. This leads to my second observation.
2) There was an uneasy balance attempting to be struck between idea exchange and selling. Interestingly, I found that IIEx had a preponderance of great presenters as compared to other MR conferences. As I reflected on why this might be the case, it became apparent that many presenters were successful entrepreneurs playing the role of leading voice for their company.
This collection of people produces an energy that manifests partly into passionate visionary presentations, and partly into sales pitches that obfuscate the details of an idea in order to protect intellectual property in a room full of “could-be-competitors.” This seems to be a significant challenge facing future iterations of IIEx: how do we encourage the collaborative exchange environment while tempering the protective sales mindset in a room full of people who are competing for limited research budget dollars?
Here’s an example of how this challenge can stunt innovation exchange. A presenter had just made a very compelling presentation about the enhanced predictive validity of gamification, when an audience member asked a question that was relevant to innovation idea exchange, but not an ideal question if someone is trying to convince an audience to buy their method. The exchange went something like this (paraphrased from memory):
Questions and Answers IIEx

Audience member: “What are the biggest obstacles you encounter from buyers when pitching the gamification of research?”
Presenter: “Well, [pause], really, [pause] once we show the data there are no objections.”
Audience member: “There are no objections that you face when trying to sell this approach?
Presenter: “I can tell you that our clients are very happy with the results.”
Audience member: “Yes, I’m sure they are. Maybe you’re misunderstanding, I love the approach. I’m wondering what obstacles we’re facing in trying to widen product adoption of gamification. I guess specifically, I’m wondering if buyers see a presentation about gaming and question whether you’re taking their business questions seriously. If so, would we benefit by re-framing the technique – do we need to call it “gamification”?
Presenter: “I can tell you that a major global financial services company has been implementing this approach for some time now.”
And there the exchange ended. The need to protect the perception of infallibility of the method in a room that included some potential buyers, stood in the way of an open exchange on how we might be able to bring these innovative methods to a broader audience more quickly. I understand this exchange and can empathize with the presenter – it is rare for someone trying desperately to advance their ideas to offer up potential weaknesses to a crowd of “could-be-competitors” and potential buyers.
I would have a hard time doing it myself. But isn’t that what we need to be doing if we’re really going to collectively push the envelope in research innovation? I guess the question is, to what degree can we make IIEx that truly open exchange of ideas and solutions without the traditional barriers that come along with IP protection and brand insulation? I think IIEx is doing this better than other conferences out there, but I’m asking how we can push it even further.
3) For fundamental lasting innovation, we need work that is founded on known principles from behavioral science. There were many presentations about advances in research based on new insight from the behavioral sciences. This is exciting and nerve-racking for us at the same time. The exciting part is that the behavioral science literature represents a deep reservoir of knowledge on the drivers of behavior that is largely untapped by business on a large systematic scale.
The nerve-racking part, is that if this science is not applied appropriately, it runs the risk of becoming perceived as another flash-in-the-pan hot topic that doesn’t provide real business advantage. If this happens, it would represent a significant set-back for our industry. At our core, we are charged with finding insights on the drivers of behavior so we can produce better products, services and market more effectively. So if we give behavioral science a bad name in business, where will we turn for fundamental understanding on the drivers of behavior?
At IIEx this was revealed as a challenge when presenters were either fast-and-loose with their language or their understanding of the concepts; or alternatively, were intent on presenting their own custom approach based loosely (if that) on recent behavioral science insight. Here are a few examples from the Biometrics and Cognitive Neuroscience Track:
The session started off with what seemed to be a refreshing reality: the panel on neuroscience included no neuroscientists. This was seen as a good sign that the people applying this science were the great translators for business applications. However, it quickly turned into a liability for the quality of the session. There were several instances of loose language and misconceptions by the experts:
• In attempting to categorize new implicit measurement techniques, EEG and fMRI were appropriately classified as neural measurement; heart rate, eye-tracking, skin conductance response were accurately classified as biometrics; and yet, unbelievably, the Implicit Association Test was incorrectly classified as “behavioral economics.”
• During the panel session of some leading entrepreneurs in the space, mastery and abundance were referred to as emotions. These are not emotions. Mastery and abundance are antecedents to emotional experiences such as satisfaction, happiness, and pride.
• Also, during the panel session, rational justification of a purchase was reframed by one speaker as the emotion trust, rather than as a cognitive process leading to trust. These misconceptions make it abundantly apparent that we need to reference the science behind triggers to emotion (cognitive reflection being one of them), or we risk giving clients faulty advice that all that matters is the emotion itself.
• When asked how one should combine emotion with rational decision processes, the answer was that you can include traditional survey questions in an emotion study. If this is the cutting edge of combining emotion and rationality in MR, then as an industry, we’re clearly lacking a common theoretical stance on how emotion and rationality interact to determine behavior. But note that the behavioral sciences are not short on theory of how emotion combines with rational thought to produce behavior, we just need to tap that reservoir of knowledge.
• Finally, after spending an hour and half presenting the case for why implicit research techniques are desired over explicit techniques to gain true insight into behavior, the neuro session featured a great presenter talking about how to categorize emotion for business application. This content seemed relevant to the session until we saw how the emotion was being measured: explicit slider scales. This technique is at least thirty years old.
IIEx blog Insight Innovation Exchange 2013 in advanced research
These are yikes moments! For audience members trying to come up to speed on this new area of research, this is terribly misleading at worst and awfully confusing at best. For audience members already practicing in these areas, this saps the confidence in the quality of the ideas being exchanged. Hopefully, this is just a reflection of our early years as an industry trying to get these ideas out to a broader audience and missing some of the details in our rush.
It’s true that some of the great translators of this kind of work are looser with the science as a sacrifice to making it accessible to a broader audience (see, for example, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink). But that is not a necessary reality (see, for example, Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational). Nonetheless, for such a young field, we run the risk of not being taken seriously, nor reaching our full potential if we are getting the fundamentals wrong, and simply speak passionately about the promise.
Importantly, it is passion that provided the genesis and fuels growth of this conference. And it is passion that is necessary for us to get these ideas out to the broader market research industry. And it is my hope, that we can leverage this passion in the next generations of IIEx to increase collaborative exchange and collectively hold ourselves accountable to the science behind what we do for the betterment of the industry.
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Aaron Reid

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Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


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