For the past five years we have been building our app Knowledge Leaps, an agile market research tool. We use it to power our own business serving some of the most demanding clients on the planet.
To build an innovative market research tool I had leave the industry. I spent 17 years working in market research and experienced an industry that struggled to innovate. There are many reasons why innovation failed to flourish, one of which lies in the fact that it is a service industry. Service businesses are successful when they focus their human effort on revenue generation (as it should be). Since the largest cost base in the research are people, there is no economic incentive to invest in the long term especially as the industry has come under economic pressure in recent years. The same could be said of many service businesses that have been disrupted by technology. Taxi drivers being a good example of this effect.
This wouldn't be the first time market research innovations have come from firms that are outside of the traditional market research category definition. For example, SurveyMonkey was founded by a web developer with no prior market research experience. While, Qualtrics was founded by a business school professor and his son, again with no prior market research industry experience.
Stepping outside of the industry and learning how other types of businesses are managing data, using data and extracting information from it has been enlightening. It has also helped us build an abstracted-solution. While we can focus on market research use-cases, since we have built a platform that fosters analytics collaboration and an open-data philosophy finding new uses for it is a frequent occurrence.
To talk tech-speak what we have done is to productize a service. We have taken the parts of market research process which happen frequently and are expensive and turned them into a product. A product that delivers the story in data with bias. It does it really quickly too. Visit the site or email us support@knowledgeleaps.com to find out more.
