Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation with IIEX

Editor’s Note: The following is a joint statement from Lukas Pospichal, GreenBook’s Managing Director, and Lenny Murphy, GreenBook’s Chief Advisor for Insights and Development.

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To our GreenBook readers,

Ten years ago, we embarked on a simple idea: what if we could create opportunities, filling an unmet need, for the best and the brightest in the market research (MRX) industry to assemble for sharing ideas and collaborating to define the future of insights?

Originating in Sao Paulo in 2013, the Insight Innovation EXchange conference series was born: IIEX.

Our goal was to bring the most disruptive start-ups, technologies, and ideas into the evolving insights and analytics industry. We wanted to showcase the newest tools and techniques, placing a bet on what would become the most widely adopted “best practices” of the present.

It was an experiment. And 10 years on, we have some pretty remarkable evidence that our simple idea was a game changer.

If a new methodology or technology driven approach has become a “best practice” or preferred solution in the past 10 years , chances are you probably saw it first at an IIEX Event!

As part of our initial event, we launched the Insight Innovation Competition in which innovators would essentially “pitch” their products and services to the community of research buyers, agencies and suppliers looking for ways to make the insights industry more effective. A small amount of prize money was awarded to the winner.

In that first Insights Innovation Competition, a scrappy, disruptive, online startup named Zappistore submitted and pitched, became a finalist, and ultimately won.

Fast forward to December of 2022, Zappi (as they are now known), a company that disrupted the industry and defined a category in the insights delivery space, just closed a private equity round of growth funding, reported at close to $170million!

Insight Innovation matters

We have been tracking the success stories and valuations of other finalists and winners of the Insights Innovation Competition through the last ten years. They continue to have impressive growth and adoption.

In that time, technologies showcased at IIEX events have transformed methodologies and delivery of the insights, helping client-side companies grow. These innovations have accelerated all brands’ ability to understand their customers and consumers’ behaviors more deeply, and take actions more quickly to make critical business decisions.

In the last ten years IIEX has brought us examples of:

• The emergence and adoption of mobile research
• Video based ethnography, online focus groups, and virtual qual
• Sentiment analysis in action
• Sophisticated improvements to sample and respondent acquisition
• The application of AI and machine learning to all manner of research and analytics
• DIY, becoming a fully mature approach for client-side insights departments to realize economies of scale, reduce costs, and get simple things done more efficiently
• AR, VR, and experiments in the metaverse
• Knowledge management platforms, ensuring each research project’s value isn’t lost after the the debrief
• ResTech innovations that define not only how we can get things done, but also enabling new things we only dreamt of doing before

Through IIEX we experienced the first gatherings to explore behavioral science (BeSci) as a part of the insights tool kit. Most practitioners forget when they first realized that BeSci is foundational to understanding how consumers make choices. But IIEX Behavior was the first insights industry event to make it mainstream in the insights world.

We have seen behemoth market leaders in MRX awarded work “because nobody ever got fired for hiring the market leader to do research” forced to become more agile thanks to competition from disruptive new market entrants. Today the largest agencies are regularly recognized for making their offerings more authentically innovative, in part because of the innovators who first took the stage at IIEX Events.

As influencers in the MRX community of practitioners, IIEX has helped address issues like privacy and authentication, reliability and efficiency, and the ability to merge different sources of data into platforms giving client-side practitioners a more holistic view of their customer insights. For the brands that have adopted these innovations, their insights team have been able to unequivocally demonstrate to their internal stakeholders that insights are essential in solving urgent business challenges.

Not everything that we have been introduced to by IIEX has stuck or gained adoption, but these are the forums in which the most important insights innovations have been revealed, demonstrated, debated, and championed.

Please join us at 2023’s IIEX Events!

Our global conferences are on the calendar: Registration is open for IIEX APAC in Bangkok on February 7- 8  and IIEX EU in Amsterdam on March 28-29.

Save the date for IIEX NA in Austin on May 24-25 (at which this year’s Insight Innovation Competition finalists will compete live and a winner will be presented with a cash award. And, we will have other IIEX 10 events in the latter part of the year, building on our past successes with IIEX Behavior and IIEX Health.

IIEX 10 is more than a conference series, it is a mindset. These IIEX 10 congregations of your colleagues, clients, peers, collaborators, and yes, your competition, are even more important in 2023. Because what we have learned through the last 10 years gives us a crucial foundation for predicting and defining the next 10. What starts here will change our world!

Join us, for IIEX to the power of 10!  Come future proof your company, your teams, your department, and your own career, as we co-create the Future of Insights.

If you want to know about all the IIEX events, please visit here.

Here’s to the next 10,