Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

Thought I would post a very brief update from the morning session of the first day at ESOMAR Innovate. Opening Keynote speaker Greg Fraley, who is an author and innovation consultant, started us off with claiming “Starbucks is Officially Dead” and has become McDonalds. His presentation Deliberate Innovation stressed the difference between simply “doing innovation vs. being innovation”. He recommended looking at the four innovation P’s of People, Product, Press, and Process. He was also a fan of the Osborn-Parnes model of CPS feeling that market research should be able to play more in innovation.

Also of great interest was Making Innovation Happen presented by PepsiCo, UK Fiona McAnena. Fiona had some interesting views on innovation and stressed that often “when you innovate you are betting against the core business” and that “innovation is not the easy path to revenue growth”. She also stressed that innovators must be optimists and that companies who focus too much on ‘strategy’ can hurt innovation in the process.

J. Alison Bryant from Nickelodeon/MTV Kids & Family Group, USA also presented this morning on interesting work her team had done helping to develop a recent highly successful ‘Dora the Explorer” video game for the Wii which was targeted at pre-schoolers. Interesting to me because of Anderson Analtyics’ work with GenX2Z.

This was just the morning session and I’ll probably revisit this post after the conference with some additional detail and opinion of the most interesting takeaways.

So far it seems like a very interesting conference. Innovation is of course a very interesting topic. One that we market researchers need to pay far more attention to.

-Tom