Chaired "Insight at the extremes" and "Games and gamification for insight" at MRS Impact 2017

Insights during “Tackling the taboos”

As the title of the conference reflects, intrinsic to the insight community is our aspiration to make an impact and during this session delegates heard from three case studies that have achieved this goal, tackling the most ambitious of objectives:

Stopping unwanted sexual behavior on public transport (Transport for London and 2CV)

Creating a dementia friendly community (Brent Council and Opinion Leader)

Ending child marriage in developing countries (Flamingo)

These highly sensitive, complex studies required intricate, multifaceted, collaborative processes to increase public awareness and drive changes in cultural norms and behaviors. Collaboration was at their core with these studies revealing what it really means to drive diverse stakeholder action and to go beyond the remit of a traditional research role, by becoming consultants and guiding the implementation of insights.

With consumers and employees alike now expecting brands and companies to go beyond their direct product or service, to have a wider social cause and mission, this session was particularly pertinent. As pressure grows for commercial brands to contribute to society they must figure out ways to tackle complex social issues of this nature.

For more information on Tackling Taboos please click on the link below:

Insights during “Games and gamification for insight”

Gamification has moved into the mainstream as a tool that helps create insight, drive change and test innovation. In this highly interactive session, three champions of gamification showcased their work, tested the boundaries, and even challenged each other to the death.

During our battle against the Lightspeed Research innovation team, we presented our paper on “Human vs. Machine – Only a game can choose the winner“.

Here is a short intro to our paper:

“How do the latest gamified crowd co-creation techniques stack up against the most advanced conjoint methodology when it comes to designing the perfect product offering? Can a group of humans playing a game create a better product than an AI computer algorithm?

To find out Lightspeed’s innovation team who have been pioneering this new co-creation methodology challenged Skim a research company who are world renowned experts in conjoint research to a research-off!

Both were set the same product design challenge, we would then use our own specialist research techniques to develop their perfect product solution and these would then be subject to a head to head comparative consumer test to see which was the best.”