The New Innovation Leaders: How Insights Teams Use AI to Drive Growth

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar. Thank you very much for joining us wherever you are in the world. My name is Mike. I’ll be your host. I’ll be leading the conversation when we get to the discussion in our panel today, and I’m delighted to be joined today by experts from Market Logic Software, one of the world’s leading platforms for AI powered, knowledge management and innovation support. Ipsos, I’m sure, needs no introduction to many of you, which is, I think, probably the world’s largest sort of research firm expert. Adam, who’s joining us from Chicago. Olaf, who’s joining us from Berlin. And Richard is, I think, not far from me in London in the UK. And Richard’s firm is a cofounder of AlchemyRx, which is an innovation consultancy. So welcome, guys. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you to those of you in the audience. You can see my colleague there is saying hello from Sao Paulo in Brazil. We’re generally very spread around the world. So, it’s always a thrill to see where people are joining from. Say hello. We’re a friendly bunch. Post in the chat to tell us where you’re joining us from today, just so, we know where our audience is based. What we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna see the results of some really great research that was done. These three organizations collaborated to conduct a survey of c suite leaders in consumer businesses. So CEOs, CEOs, CMOs about perceptions of innovation and whether it’s a priority, whether it’s successfully, being supported, and the role of insights teams in there. So Adam’s gonna lead a presentation on the topic, then you’ll see, then we’ll have a a discussion around some of the implications. We’d love to get you all on hold. Please post questions, comments as you go along. You can put them into that chat. Where you can see, Carmen, by now, you’re welcome. Thanks for posting. Post your questions in there or in the q and a tab, either place. I’ll find them. Don’t worry. And we’re looking forward to a great conversation. If you wanna go deeper into this, not now, obviously, afterwards, but there is a a much fuller report behind the presentation that Adam will be giving. You can download that from the link my colleague’s gonna share now from the Market Logic website. There’s some really great data in there about perceptions of insights teams and their role in innovation as well as, you know, corporate innovation more broadly. So I’m gonna hand over to Alan in just a minute. If you want to follow along, because you need the volume turned down, there is a live captions button. You can press the CC at the bottom of the screen there. And this session is being recorded. You will be able to watch the replay anytime afterwards. It’ll be hosted on our site, or you can use the same link to watch it here again. And if I don’t think you’ve got any particularly small, charts or graphs on the slides, but if you do wanna blow it up, you can go full screen. At the top of the presentation area, there’s a little full screen toggle so you can make the slides bigger if you need to. I think that’s all. I do actually just wanna share some other resources for innovation. We do have a topic page on insight platforms where we collect all of our innovation related content, webinars, demos, and articles, ebooks. So you can download the, you know, you can download all that stuff. Almost all of it is accessible for free. Lots of expert resources there as well. So thanks. Cynthia has just posted the link in the chat. That’s me done, I think. Adam, over to you for the presentation and sharing some really powerful insights from this research that’s been done, with your organization. So I’ll be quiet now for the next ten or fifteen minutes. Excellent. Thanks so much, Mike. I’m really looking forward to the conversation here. So so as Mike said, we we’re we’re gonna be presenting some survey results, but I wanna give a quick background on we got to this point. So IPSS Market Logic and Alchem Rx began this partnership, last summer to start to explore what can be done to motivate companies to pay more attention to innovation. We know we’ve all been working in the industry for quite a long time. We know that innovation is a key driver for growth, but there has been a trend over the last several years that it is it’s in decline. There isn’t enough investment. There isn’t enough focus on it, and and then it’s impacting the results and impacting the potential success of new launches. So we wanted to explore that topic. We we you know, in in collaboration with with our partners, you know, we have several different thought pieces that we wrote about that, and then we culminated in this this survey of c suite personnel as Mike talked about. Right? So so we’ll talk through the results. I’ll present it, and then we’ll a discussion, me, Olaf, and Richard with Mike. I want some of these mean, and we can address some of your questions. But getting specifically to the survey, our focus here was we wanted to understand within the CPG industry and kinda tangential industries, what were the perceptions around innovation? We we saw changes in how innovation was being addressed. We saw changes in the success rate of innovation. We wanted to know what perception CEOs had of that, what potentially could be driving those differences. So we talked to a number of different people in in the c suite, you know, chief marketing officers, chief growth, chief executive officers, two hundred fifty respondents total. We fielded this last fall. Twenty one days in field. We had we had, again, a number of different people responding, and you’ll note that these are all large organizations. This is a hundred billion annual revenue plus. So these are industry leaders that are giving us their opinions on on innovation. So it really does kinda capture what’s going on in the market. Right? So as expected, there there is this perception, and we know it’s true from all of our time in the industry, there is this perception that innovation is a priority for growth. Organizations really need to be focusing on innovation in order to be successful. It’s ranked as the the number one driver for growth. Introducing new products and services really is what keeps the company afloat. Right? Other priorities that they had as well, though, beyond that were increasing their advertising and growing the market. So advertising and and market growth obviously are are directly related to those new launches as well. Right? Not only are we seeing that the perception is that it’s currently important, but organizations, as as big as it is, recognize that it’s going to continue to grow and continue to become more important. So eighty two percent are expecting the importance of innovation to increase over the next three years. Right? However, we know that innovation isn’t as successful as it could be, and it’s not having the impact it could be. The the c suite recognizes this as well. So we see that, you know, among among c suite personnel, a vast amount of them are indicating that they’re they don’t feel they’re effective in generating new innovations. Right? What is interesting, though, is not only are they not effective at generating new innovations, but it’s not driving enough revenue. So we know innovation has the potential to drive revenue, but in reality, it’s not doing it enough right now. Part of the reason for that is that the innovations that companies are launching simply aren’t meeting those launch goals. So what is going on in the innovation development process that is causing them to launch innovations that really aren’t as successful as they need to be and aren’t hitting those targets that they need to hit? So we wanted to explore that a little bit, have a better understanding of why we weren’t seeing as much success as we expected to see and what organizations need to do to change. Right? So the first indicator that, you know, there’s there’s some modification that’s needed is the fact that when we’re talking about innovation, most companies aren’t spending enough on true innovation. When you look at the spread of new products and services that are being launched, it looks like Mike, it looks like my my deck may have stopped. Oh, there we go. You’re okay. Is that visible still? It’s fine. Yep. Still visible. It’s good. Okay. Great. So what we find is that most of the new things that we launched aren’t true innovation. Of the new stuff that’s launched, seventy four percent of them are close in line extensions. There are modifications to messaging. There are modifications to packaging. They’re not true innovation. So the the idea that you’re gonna be able to drive growth with innovation when only twenty six percent of the things that you launch really are new innovations, you’re not gonna see the revenue growth that you need to see. Right? So one of the challenges here is that the source of new innovations isn’t isn’t where it should be. What we find is that less than half of innovations are actually coming from consumer research. Companies are just simply not investing the time and effort necessary to understand their consumers and build innovation around that consumer understanding. What’s interesting is while they recognize that they’re they’re not you know, don’t aren’t doing the right consumer research, they also recognize they don’t have the insights available that they need. So this seems like a simple solve. We need to be doing more research to have those innovations available, and we need to have a better understanding of our consumers in order to be successful. So it’s kind of a straightforward picture here that really there isn’t enough research that’s being done so that organizations have a true understanding of what’s going on with their consumers and what their consumers want. Another thing we found that was really interesting is a challenge that we’ve seen, and we see this both from c suite executives and at IPSS, as we look at our robust databases and all the stuff we’ve run over the last several years, we see that differentiation in new innovations has decreased significantly. There has been a trend over the last several years that new innovations tend to be less unique than they were before when you compare to competition. So so what’s driving this? We see that, you know, thirty six percent are saying that, you know, they’re not adequately differentiated. However, the the the source that c suite indicates most often is where they’re getting their innovation ideas from is competition. So it’s really difficult to differentiate from competition when competition is the source of the new innovations you intend to launch. Right? There simply isn’t enough information from consumers that they’re collecting in order to launch new things to fill those gaps in the market instead of just kind of having a close follow to whatever your competitor is launching. Right? So a challenge is that they’re they’re not coming up with enough new ideas in order to launch. And one challenge that we see all the time in innovation is that organizations underestimate the amount of ideas they need in order to have a successful launch. So it really is about moving up that funnel and generating a lot more content in order to come up with the ones that are gonna be most successful in launch. Right? And we see that a significant portion of the innovations that the ideas that are generated are killed before they even get to launch stage. So it just demonstrates that if you wanna have a lot of stuff that you’re gonna launch in the market, you really need to raise the bar on how many you’re gonna test in the first place. Right? Another challenge here, though, is not just about how many innovations are being developed and how many ideas are being developed. There isn’t a good internal process that a lot of organizations are following to monitor their performance and figure out how to improve. So when we looked at, you know, the survey, we identified that a a large amount of these companies weren’t successfully tracking how many ideas they were generating. They weren’t successfully tracking success rates for the innovations that they test. They really didn’t have a clear view of how their funnel was working and whether or not it was effective. So what we recognize, more consumer, you know, research is needed, more understanding is needed, even when that is being done, it’s not being tracked effectively in order to continually improve the process. Right? So so a lot of red flags here about issues that need to be addressed and challenges that that we’re gonna see in the market in order to get that innovation back to growth. One of the things that we all recognize that can be a driver here and and that can help is is the impact of AI. Right? So so this survey isn’t just about AI, but we are definitely seeing that as a as a key unlock for how we can generate more ideas, how we can build innovation quicker, and how we can kind of refine our innovation process. What’s what’s notable is that it’s not just us that says that. It’s it’s all the the c suite personnel have the same impression. Right? What I think is most interesting, yes, eighty six percent state it will be very extremely important incorporating AI to innovation. What I think is more relevant than that is not a single person indicated that it would not be important at all. So every single person that we surveyed indicated that at least to some degree AI was gonna be important to innovation with the vast majority saying it would be very extremely important. Right? Not only are they saying it’s important, a lot of them have already started, and we’re at a point now where ninety seven percent of them are indicating that they already have some form of AI incorporated into the process. So if you’re if you’re among that three percent that doesn’t, you’re you’re you’re behind the game, and it now is really the time to start looking at how do we incorporate this in a way that we can accelerate our innovation process. Process. So if we if we kinda summarize that, and then we’ll talk through these, and, you know, Mike’s got some great questions for us to go through. We know that innovation is essential, but there really isn’t a prioritization around it that there needs to be. And there isn’t the confidence that the insights that companies are getting from from their innovation work is is successful. They really need to refine that process and find a better way to to improve and feel confident that they understand the consumers. We also know that innovation isn’t isn’t innovation right now. Innovation is a lot more renovation than it is innovation. During during COVID, during, you know, with with pressure from US tariffs, with financial issues, a lot of companies were playing it safe. We’re past the point where you can play it safe. For a few years, maybe that made sense focusing on those renovations and doing close in stuff. Everyone needs to accelerate at this point in order to be successful because that’s what all the competitors are doing. Right? True innovation starts with consumer insight, not consumer data. So, yes, it’s helpful to have more data, but the goal isn’t more data, the goal is better insights. So you wanna be doing that that research process effectively. You wanna review your own internal process so that you’re you’re not just collecting more and more data, you’re actually able to pull successful and meaningful insights from it. We also know that innovation is a growth engine. It has to be managed like a growth engine. You discipline in your process so that you can identify funnel metrics and learn how to govern that process effectively. And one of the things that can be a catalyst here is AI. Right? So that is just a broad overview. It’s a pretty robust survey. And like Mike said, we’ve got some data that we can share out, but we wanted to start with kind of a broad overview of of what we found in in that survey. So so, Michael, I’ll turn it back over to you. Thanks, Adam. That was great. Really good context, and it’s good to hear you actually walked through it. I mean, I’ve I’ve read the report for other people who wanted to see the full report. It is there in the in the chat. I urge you to go and look at it because there’s lots of really great information. And, actually, you know, I think yesterday in the in the Feet, the Financial Times, there was an article on Hershey and Reese’s, so Reese’s Pieces, and objections from one of the original Reese heirs saying that, you know, this is just an example of another, you know, pale renovation trying to stretch the original product far too far. So this is a very live issue, I think, for a lot of people. You know, Richard, you you know, you’re sort of, bread and butter is is innovation. Why do you think this sort of rate of real innovation is declining to the extent that’s coming through in that survey? Well, yeah. Thanks, Mike. It’s a good question. And I think there’s probably a combination of of of reasons that are conspiring to make what we are calling for today real innovation, ubiquitous in organizations. So a couple of thoughts on this. So first of all, there’s no doubt over the last ten, fifteen years, even twenty years, there’s been a massive focus on driving the bottom line at the expense of the top line, and this has manifested itself internally for companies and a focus on costs. And some of the first kind of areas to get cut when the accountants are are sort of let loose in search of that bottom line growth are things like investment in insights, things like investment in training and capability development, not just in insights, but also in marketing, in brand development, and indeed in r and d. And you you can see this all over the place, even just looking at balance sheets of companies and how their investments in these areas has reduced significantly. I think combined with that has been a desire for short term results, very much so. I know some companies have tried to sort of move away from that in terms of their reporting. But even so, companies are focused very much on, you know, the next twelve months and their ability to have R and D programs that look two, three, four, five, six years out is becoming less and less. I think a third reason that I’d focus on, I do think that there is a a growing lack of curiosity by marketing organizations about the consumers that they purport to serve, which is a real shame. I I cannot figure out how you can how you can be interested in a job in marketing and indeed in r and d if you do not have this innate curiosity to understand why are my consumers thinking like that, and what is it that I can do to make them behave behave differently. I think there were a couple of other issues that Adam touched on in his presentation that are worth talking about. For sure, there is a lack of real funnel management, and I think we may come back and talk about that a little bit later on. But people are not playing the numbers game on innovation. They don’t have enough ideas, and therefore, they don’t have enough ideas to kill off to allow these strong ideas not only just to survive to move through the funnel, but to be able to coalesce the the investment dollars around those strong ideas. And so you end up with with tunnels, not funnels. You end up with all of the ideas that start go through to the end. You have a as a consequence, you have a much higher failure rate, and people turn around and say, look, see, we told you innovation doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in our categories. Our categories are mature categories. You can innovate in these categories, which, of course, you know, we all we we all know that to be the case. The problem with all of this is that this becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It becomes a very unvirtuous cycle, if you like, where people don’t believe in innovation. They don’t invest in it. When they do do it, it’s badly funded, badly resourced. The innovation fails and people say, I I told you so. We’re not gonna give any more money to innovation. We’ll focus on renovation. We’ll focus on promotions. And as a consequence, the opportunities pass them by. And it’s only when a competitor comes along, of course, who is prepared to invest in innovation that they suddenly wake up and realize, you know what? Consumers, funnily enough, they do want innovation. They do want news. And even the most moribund of categories, consumers want news and innovation and so on. And, of course, it’s our job to provide that. Yeah. Great. Okay. I think a a fantastic sort of encyclopedic view of of all of the different drivers behind this. And, Ashley, thanks for your comment. Great contribution. If anyone else has comments or questions as we go through, please post them here. Ashley’s saying, no. She agrees with you, Richard. You know, a lot of that lack of caring about the audience comes from overreliance, vanity metrics in media, belief that analytics will tell people everything they need to know without actually questioning, you know, the backbone of that data. So I kind of not really buying into true consumer insights and research that’s gonna reveal, you know, what’s going on. A couple of things you said there, point to some of the, you know, the the great data that’s in that report, Adam, from, from the survey. Actually, both from the survey and from other data sets. So, obviously, you know, the competitive mimicry so, you know, competitive response is a big factor. But there was data in the main report I saw that says consumers are starting to notice. So the perception of and I’m I’m probably gonna phrase this slightly wrong, but the perception of uniqueness of ideas that is being tested has collapsed. It looked like, you know, in the last sort of five years. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Yeah. And and I think some of that relates to some of the stuff Richard was talking about. Right? That there just isn’t the investment necessary, but we are seeing, I mean, across categories that there is there is a significant decline in uniqueness. I I do think a lot of this is is companies are playing it safe. There there is, you know, to the point Richard was making about looking at everything on a a quarterly basis, how do we demonstrate profits over the next quarter? There’s less appetite for we need to generate more ideas and more appetite for no, we just need something that’s gonna be successful. And so there isn’t enough investment earlier in the funnel to to come up with those things that are gonna be a little bit more distinct. And by its very nature, if something’s gonna be unique, it it it probably is going to be less of a safe bet. Right? You’re gonna have to take a risk for something to be a little differentiated. I don’t think companies tend to be as comfortable with that, you know, that we need to kinda push the balance and come up with something that’s a little different. So, you know, one of the challenges that we see and something that we’ve we’ve kind of talked to our clients for years is you need to be working further up the funnel. You need to be pushing a lot of things through. You need to be expanding the bounds of the category. You need to be thinking about things that may be a little bit unique and different. You know, if we go back about five, six years ago, the ready to drink cocktail category didn’t exist. Right? And and it’s it’s a very minor change from, you know, some of the other products that are out there, but it boomed because it expanded the alcohol category really significantly. Right? So being able to kind of expand those fountains and explore is really what needs to happen, and you only do that by by having a lot more ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Great. And, Octav, I can see your question is fantastic, and I’m gonna come back to it in a minute if that’s okay. And think it’s a really good provocation in the context of being consumer led or, you know, research led for this type of innovation. We’ll come back to it in a second because I I wanna understand this perception that the CEOs and the CMOs seem to have of insights, and it may be the insights function. It may be the output from research, it may be just their legacy perceptions of what of what research data and insights is. But why are they blaming not enough insights available, a lack of consumer understanding? Is that that the organizations have underfunded, you know, generating that knowledge, or is it that it’s not making its way through the organization because there isn’t that structured framework for approaching innovation like a growth engine? What’s Richard, what’s your take on that? So We we we we we hear this often. The the easy the easy answer well, the answer that’s easiest to address is the lack of funding and insights, and and that’s that’s clear that companies are not keeping up with their the investment in what we would call strategic or fundamental research around their consumers. They allow it to lapse. It becomes out of date. They don’t bother updating because they they say that we we’ll leave it this year or leave it to next year and so on. And that’s relatively easy to solve. You just got to you just gotta go and spend the money. I think, you you know, that the harder one is where, you know, CEOs and CMOs have been burnt because they’ve been given insights that that that they believe, in hindsight, have been incorrect or wrong, and therefore this kind of reinforces prejudices in the organization that all insights are wrong. Now one of the things that we may come to a little bit later on is, you know, what happens when projects fail, and and, invariably, we find there is a complete lack of forensic accountability or failed innovation that would go back and say, look. You you got the wrong insights or you got the right insights, but you you apply them erroneously or you didn’t listen to them as the case may be. And a well performing company would would do this. They would objectively go back and look at the assumptions that were made around the mixed development process and say, did we get this right? Did we get it wrong? And what can we do next time to, you know, to to, you know, to to to to to make it work? But it it’s just all too easy to sort of say, well, it’s in the insights are wrong or or misleading, and and therefore, we won’t invest in insights. I mean, that’s just, you know, brainless. Yeah. Yeah. Great. If I could add something really quick to that, Mike. I I I think another challenge related to that is the speed of research has increased dramatically, and the speed of getting insights has increased dramatically. And when that’s not managed properly, sometimes that speed comes at the at the expense of insights. Right? So, yes, you can we can test things incredibly quick for you, but is there gonna be enough time getting your results tomorrow? Is that worth sacrificing the quality of the insights and what those, you know, what those results actually mean? Right? So there has to be a balance there of how do we how do we accelerate this innovation process, but do it in a way that we’re not we’re not compromising the quality of of what it means. Yeah. Okay. So I’m gonna come back to Octav’s question now. And, Adam, I’ll start with you, but I do wanna bring Olaf in because I know you’ll have some good perspectives on this. Octav is saying, how can consumer insight actually lead to true innovation? What’s your definition of innovation? Isn’t the core principle of a breakthrough that it addresses and need the market hasn’t even conceived yet? So I think, you know, there are some assumptions implicit in the way that question’s framed. But, Adam, your your take, first of all, you know, can you actually be Yes. Led if you’re if you’re creating breakthrough ideas? Absolutely. And and I would I would I would challenge that a little bit. I don’t think breakthrough is is is something that consumers aren’t even aware of yet. It’s a need consumers currently have. It’s just not being met in the way they expect right now. Right? It’s not being met effectively, and it’s not something that they realize can be met. So that need exists. It’s just a matter of how do you how do you mine that data and identify where where that need comes from. Right? So so that’s really about getting in there and understanding from your consumers how their level of satisfaction with what currently is in market and how they’re addressing the challenges they’re having with with, you know, the solutions that are available now. Because once you once you get that, once you kinda have that map, once you have that understanding of what needs they have and what wants they have, and you overlay that with the solutions available and how effective those solutions are at satisfying those needs, that’s when you can identify the gaps and say, okay. Here is real opportunity for breakthrough. We can meet the need in a new way here that isn’t being met. Even though when you think of something like Swiffer, you know, that that that was breakthrough. It’s it’s not that unique. I mean, it is it is meeting a need that already existed that was being met by another product, but it’s doing it in a different way. So so that was there for the taking once once people identified the thermostat gap. So, Olaf, don’t know if you wanted to layer on top of that as well. Yeah. Thanks. No. I think I agree that, of course, there can be potential in solution space that’s not yet discovered, if you will, to to find new ways to serve needs that already exist in in novel ways. But, also, I think there are oftentimes situations where you would have more not a fully articulated need, but rather maybe certain early indicators, certain not yet formed expressions. And then, of course, it’s it is maybe half science and half art to to try to to find to detect them. But again, here, I’m sure we’ll come back to that later. Also, now I do think technology offers ways to more rapidly at least scan that space and and identify pockets that merit maybe attention and further evaluation. So I think, indeed, there there are ways to work with the with the data and and the existing consumer understanding that can inform a lot of potential opportunity in various ways. Yeah. I think the the tension here is between the, entirely apocryphal sort of Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, you know, you can’t ask consumers what they want versus uncovering or revealing latent needs or trends that you can actually identify through, you know, different mechanisms. I think we’ll come back to that when we talk specifically about how AI can be deployed for that type of, you know, revealing those those behaviors and needs. Catherine, you’ve, you’ve posted a great follow-up to Richard’s comments about, you know, the postmortems and the diagnosis after failed innovation. So many companies fail projects and often, well, you know, briefing quality might not be there or it’s a disconnect with the strategy, willingness to invest time, you know, to allow the innovation to to get to profitability. So, you know, clearly, there’s, you know, touching a nerve with some people who have had similar experiences there. What it just to come back to, to innovation teams before we dig further into insights, and in particular, the role of AI and how that’s that’s really kind of powering up different approaches to this. What the insight team or innovation teams, excuse me, need to do differently? You know, I like your you talked about, you know, tunnels versus funnels, Richard, you know, quite nice visual metaphor. But, you know, is it about generating more ideas at the top? Is it about that structured tracking of performance that’s a little bit better or working differently with data? You know, Richard, let’s start with you as a a take on that, what should we do? I think I think it’s gonna be a a little bit of all of the above, to be honest. You know, it’s it’s gonna be more and better insights. It’s gonna be handling handling conflicting insights. You know, and this is one of the things I think Adam touched on a little bit, you know, where in this day and age, you know, life is more complicated because oftentimes you get data that conflicts with itself. Now, Olef has got a fantastic solution that kinda gets around that, and marketing people have to be able to get to grips with ways to handle conflicting data. Consumers are complicated, you know. Not everything is cut and dried. It’s not binary. So, you know, learning to handle consumer complexity, I think, is is, you know, is gonna be really important. But it it is it is it is a numbers game for sure, you know, so it’s more it’s more investment in insights. It’s giving insights a more preeminent role in the organization, and I know we’re gonna come back and talk about that a little bit later on. It’s about having more ideas, and it’s also about the whole entire process of managing the innovation funnel and and managing, you know, managing it properly. And as part of that, ensuring that insights are easily and widely accessible throughout the organization, and and, you know, that that’s often what we see is that, you know, the the the knowledge that the the organization has got a lot of funding often we find is is not given that that that access that it it so desperately needs. Yeah. Great. A nice, I think a nice tip when we come to talk specifically about the the insights, team skills, mechanisms that can enable that. But, Adam, do you have a do you have a sense of how innovation teams can adapt their approach, you know, some some recommendations for them? Yeah. Yeah. So so there there’s a show that was really popular in the US. I don’t know how popular it was in in Europe called Mythbusters. And and there’s this this common quote mythbusters is the only difference between science and ******** around is writing it down. And and I really think that’s that’s essential when we’re thinking about innovation. Right? I think you need to be introspective in your process. Right? And, you know, to to Richard’s point about we need to generate a lot more. We need to be effective at generating a lot more content so that we can identify what’s gonna be successful. Layered on top of that is you need to track that so you can figure out what different triggers you you activated that made you successful. Successful. Right? So unless you’re constantly reviewing and refining that process and tracking your metrics so that you can understand what has been successful, what has connected us better to the consumers, when have we been able to generate. Of the hundred ideas we generated and, you know, ten of them were successful versus one, what was the difference in those processes and how do we modify that? So I think it’s it’s not it’s not a a super, you know, elaborate answer, but, really, it goes back to the basics. If you need to have effective internal metrics, are tracking your progress and be willing to refine your process as you need to. Yeah. Okay. So much, much better structuring about that. Like you say, you know, enabling the growth engine that innovation can be if you’ve got the right frameworks and tools and measurements in place. Okay. And what about on the insights side of things? So, Olaf, you know, Richard alluded to, you know, the one of the challenges in making insights more available. I mean, I don’t wanna you know, words in your mouth or or tee you up too much. But, you know, can you talk a little bit about how insights, leaders, teams, and, you know, their their tools and methods can enable better innovation? Yeah. That’s a great question. I mean, technology, I think, can help a lot as an amplifier. So it enables people now to to infuse, yeah, processes, steps, workshops with insights that were more difficult to reach before. On the one hand, by making them available in a in a low barrier way, of course, the ubiquitous democratization that we all love, but also by now proactively building tools and and helping support those processes. Leads. Like, just briefly thinking back about what should innovation teams do differently, I I think also, I would say maybe they need to be more systematic in the top the more disciplined way of doing and working through their innovation. I mean, I a few of our customers, and I see a lot of more episodic innovation work, I would say, where there’s a spike and then there’s a rush to to work on things, but but there is no real cadence that would keep keep the funnel flowing and filled. And, yeah, I think that’s an opportunity also from the insights side to step in because you can now come and help with ways of not only providing the insights, providing the leads, providing the information into the process, but also to provide a better structure to help people navigate this journey in a consistent way. So in general, I think technology AI specifically, we always need to think about it as an amplifier. If we do suboptimal things with it, it will amplify the suboptimal approach. But if cleverly employed, can really make a big difference and be a big lever. Yeah. One of your other partners at Market Logic, the the Zappy team, they’ve they’ve talked a lot about moving the mindset from discrete projects, you know, research projects to do things to much more of a a kind of data, a systemic framework, having these kind of data assets that are more continuous. Is that I mean, do you do you see I guess, you know, is your philosophy kind of aligned with that? Do you see that starting to happen with with insights teams and their organizations? Yeah. I mean, what we see is as we are also supporting those those innovation processes, what we see is, first off, a great desire and and willingness to take this opportunity to more to operationalize innovation playbooks people have. Every customer every company has a wonderful philosophy of how to go about innovation, of course, and and a very specific way of how to think about the steps to accomplish successful innovation, but then struggles to maybe bring that systematically to life. And there is the one layer which is more the insights, the data layer where you wanna build continuous learning and compounding insights basically by going back to what you’ve done before. But if you pair that then also with a systematic approach of how you run through your innovation journey, which also can learn, can go back, can understand what have we done before, what worked, what didn’t. Maybe there were ideas whose time hasn’t come yet, but we can revisit them. Aside from the content, also the system can help a lot in, really building a component capability. Richard, are you seeing, you know, this this kind of interface of insights and innovation? Are you seeing organizations, you know, adopt more of a continuous data collection, continuous, you know, process for insights as part of that, or is it is it still kind of struggling to get off the ground? I I think I think it’s varied. I think there are some organizations who are who are who are doing that and doing that well, and I think in others, you know, still still struggling, to be honest. Yeah. It’s a bit of a mixed bag by the sounds of it. There’s a few areas of innovation in this space for insights that I’d I’d like to, I guess, explore, understand a little bit more, you know, perceptions of. Adam, you may have a view on some of this as as well as as Olaf. So agentic processes that are, you know, that are kind of a bit more autonomous. We’ve got the growth of personas. We’ve got, obviously, generative AI tools that can help, you know, sort of automatically create concepts on the fly and, you know, and be tested. I mean, I guess, what what what’s your take? Not necessarily as a as a kind of an IPSOS viewpoint, but I know you’re, you know, you’re investing heavily in some of these areas, Adam. Can you just talk a little bit about some of these frontier approaches to the parts of innovation? Yeah. I think there’s two key areas where you can think about AI as being really instrumental in success. Right? The first one is accelerating and expanding. So this is, you know, having it generate instead of, you know, those old processes of sitting in a room and coming with ideas work, but they take some time and and it’s a limited set of items. Right? So having AI help with that first round of generating a lot of content that can then be human reviewed and identified from there. Right? We’re testing things quickly. You know? We’re we’re doing things in Epsys like synthetic data and and and running AI AI led concept testing. Right? So that to kind of accelerate the development, I think, is is one key area, and I think it’s the area most people focus on, which I think is really impactful and can continue to be impactful. But the other area that I think is really important is is internal learning. So one of the areas that I regularly worked on years ago with companies was doing meta analysis. Hey. We’ve been doing research with you for the last couple years. We want an analysis of when we’ve been successful, why we’ve been successful, and, you know, what things we can do to improve our process. And before AI, that was a pretty laborious process. We are going through and you’re running some analysis. AgenTik AI is is really a key unlock there. Right? Being able to tie this data into an agent model, and and and you’re basically at that point having a chat where you’re saying, what has been the key driver for differentiation and the innovations that I’ve launched? And all of that data exists. You know, when you compile all that together, you can get some really effective learnings in a way where it kind of ties together everything we’re talking about today, generating more ideas so that you can kind of analyze them, reviewing your innovation process, and and being able to to refine and improve it going forward. I I think it’s gonna be a really big unlock there as well. So, Olaf, I don’t know if you’ve got stuff you wanna add on today. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Adam. Great great perspective. I when I think about it, I like to think about it, of course, as we’re working with our customers really along the the steps in in this innovation journey. And and we really see applications for AI starting at pre innovation, if you will, automatically, agentically looking at the data and trying to mine it and flag relevant and interesting areas to to be looking at and going into an innovation project starting also to help frame the brief. I think one of the comments said, you know, maybe the failed projects really were were duped to fail already because the brief was bad and not sharp and clear. Also there, you can do a lot by having your AI spar and challenge if if your brief is really on point, if your challenges are really well understood, etcetera. And then, of course, the obvious things to go in and surface everything you know across your history, across your corpora corpora of of knowledge, of insights, of data to inform to provide the backdrop, to really inform your innovation, and then going into those creative exercises, generating ideas. And also synthetic personas, you said, synthetic panels even get feedback on those, optimize them. But I also wanna say from our perspective from my personal perspective, this still is obviously an exercise which absolutely requires the human in the loop and the human to guide and judge. I mean, we could technically build agents that do everything from a to z, but I would not bet that that will be a very compelling innovation that comes out there. But still, it can provide so much support in making in opening the space really and showing you the options of what could be done. And in that regard, it is extremely helpful. And at the same time, it’s also challenging we see for for the innovation teams working with that because suddenly the way we work is so different. Previously, you may be used to the workshops and be very creative engaged interaction, and now you are also confronted with very, very, let’s say, powerful and dense and rich content by an AI that gives you all the options, basically, and says, here’s the best shot we have. Here’s everything we know about it. Here’s fifty different ways we could approach it. Over to you human now to absorb it and and decide where to go. And that is that is a very challenging different way of working. So people are also trying to wrap their head around how to how to reconcile their words, how to take the best learnings from the AI at the same time also still keep this human creative element in there, and that’s that’s not so easy. Yeah. But I think it’s a it’s a it’s the sort of meta challenge preoccupation of, I think, most people in our industry is this, you know, what’s the what’s the relative blend of the human expert, the, you know, the the AI? How do you get those two things? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s just one comment about, you know, relying over the human AI generated ideas, meaning cognitive surrender. And I I have to say what we see there is I mean, we’re all humans, and there is an expectation and the tendency for us all to say, oh, AI AI is gonna do it for me. Just click next next next next. I don’t wanna think anymore. So, actually, what we start doing is building intentionally friction into the process to stop people from just saying, yeah, next, but make you think and then reflect. So that is for sure a challenge. Yeah. Okay. Great question, Alexander. We’ve got five or ten minutes left, and please do post more comments and questions. We have some really great contributions from people in the audience. And, Alexander, I don’t know if anyone caught that. That was, Olaf referencing the the question there about about cognitive surrender and the risk, you know, of of giving up too much. But do please post your your comments and questions here. If things occur to you afterwards, we can always connect you with our expert speakers for follow-up sessions as well. But so we’ve got about about five minutes or so left. And I’m wondering, you know, can we bring it to life a little bit with some examples? So, Adam, you know, don’t know whether you’re able to reference companies that you work with specifically or that it’s all partners with where you’ve seen some great case studies of adopting AI, you know, within insights for innovation that you that you can talk about. Yeah. Yeah. I I in broad scopes. Right? You know, it not specific companies I can name, but what I can tell you the differentiator is between the companies that that do it effectively and the ones that don’t is kind of they’re right back to what Olaf was talking about. Right? It’s finding the right mix of AI plus human. And that’s kinda central to the way we think about AI in IPSS, that it’s got human intelligence plus artificial intelligence. So so the ones we’ve had that have been really successful are the ones that use AI at several points in that innovation development process, but it’s it’s really kind of a back and forth. We start with the human. We look at the consumer. We see you know, we talk to real people and figure out what needs they have. Then we use AI to kinda help cluster that and understand, you know, what the commonalities are. Right? And then, you know, seeing how those commonalities align with their strategic vision and what areas they they want to explore using AI to build innovations from there. So so it’s this kind of back and forth. The companies that are effective at doing that, that can that can effectively balance how much they need to be involved in the process and what steps they don’t need to worry about because AI can be leveraged to to, you know, shorten that timeline. Those are the ones that we’ve seen that have been able to, you know, accelerate speed to market and get things that are a lot more successful once they do launch. Great. And, Olaf, I know you don’t need to be quite so coy about a couple of customers you work with because they’ve been award winning case studies. So I was wondering, can you can you share a little bit about one or two of those, you know, what the hallmarks are of the adoption of AI, that insights? Yeah. I think we yes. Of course. We we have been working, of course, in various corners, let’s say, of the innovation related processes. We have some customers that we work with where we bring, for example, a lot of their strategic consumer understanding assets to life with the help of AI. So for example, they will invest into a lot of demand spaces, work, and systematically systematically and continuously maintain that information across their markets. And that was always great data for them, but they always struggle to how are we going to lift this now into the real application. And now with AI, you can start to to build interactive elements, personas, panels, and so on that can draw on this data and then can make it interactive and can make it enable the teams to really leverage it in the process, which doesn’t, of course, replace the ultimate test at the end of the day, but which is a great means to to make use of those assets. We have other customers like like Fonterra, one of the biggest dairy companies in the world that that really is now ruling out our this innovation solution end to end to really facilitate the entire process from briefing through to concept that then goes into the further funnel. And there on the one hand, there’s a lot of, let’s say, operational efficiencies that they see, which is always the easy let’s say, inside out business case to make. But also there there’s exactly, again, this very interesting discussion and and emerging practices of how do you work with this really now. Everybody’s flying into a location to do a one week workshop around innovation. How do we best use AI to prepare, to use it during that time, and to also then capture and learn from what we’ve done? And we see a lot of great feedback. I have to say I was always as we developed that and everybody was always a little skeptical, will AI really be able to produce relevant content, and will it not just be beautiful hallucinations? I think we’re kind of past that. Customers we work with are really convinced that it is able to generate relevant, inspiring candidates, let’s say, for innovation. But, again, bringing you into the loop is is key, and it remains key there. Yeah. Sadly, it’s a little bit too early to point to the wonderful product on the shelf that is Oh. The blockbuster yet. No. But I I mean, I’ve seen a number of different studies case studies that have shown the gradual improvement of, like, the sort of share of ideas that were originated through some of these, you know, persona or agentic approaches that are starting to, you know, to kinda creep up in in the share of, you know, consumer ratings. So it’s certainly beginning to have an impact. I think we will be wrapping up in in a couple of minutes time. So do if you have any final questions for our experts, now’s your chance to post them. I I just wanna ask around the, the board and with, I guess, your final recommendation. Most of the audience that we have here are insights professionals, a a kind of smattering of innovation experts, but predominantly, insights people supporting innovation teams or working in partnership or maybe leading them. What would be your recommendations? You know, what’s your your sort of one biggest recommendation that insights leaders could do differently to improve innovation outcomes? And I can start with you, Richard, if that’s okay. Yeah. Mike, thanks. I had a list of about three or four things, but in the interest of time, I’ll I’ll focus on the one thing. And to to be honest, the answers on the question is that insight insight leaders need to lead the consumer in the organization. That’s the one thing that we would say. Now I know it’s easier said than done, but if there’s one person in the organization who’s gonna represent the consumer and what they want and what they don’t want when it comes to innovation, it’s gonna be that insight leader. Having having been part of an insight function myself, I can tell you that I wouldn’t want to be an insight leader in an organization where I wasn’t allowed to be able to represent the voice of the consumer. That that’s that’s not what I would sign up for. So I would want to work in a company that is a consumer centric organization, or which I can help make a consumer centric organization, and therefore, where I can lead as that insight leader. Great. Okay. Thanks, Richard. Adam, what’s your what’s your principal recommendation? Yeah. I’ll I’ll I’ll tell you my second biggest recommendation because I think Richard’s is probably the most important from my perspective too. Right? But but I think the second thing is, you know, effectively reviewing that process and recognizing you have to be a learning organization. Your process as it is now isn’t going to work ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, same as the process you were in twenty years ago. It doesn’t work now. You need to constantly review and refine your process and track it effectively so that you can understand when you need to grow, when you need to evolve, when you need to change in order to be able to launch successful innovations. Great. Thanks. Olaf, did have you have have we have we damaged you by going last? Have the other guy stolen your your best idea? No. No. No. No. I I go down to number three on this. No. Maybe a little bit connected also to to what Adam said, and, of course, Richard made the main point there. But I think also now with the changes that are happening with technology, with AI, that is an opportunity for the insights leader to take that as the right to speak and to shape now the change more towards this insights direction. Now is the window where things change, and now is a great opportunity to come from that angle and and help revisit and rethink maybe how this process works. Great. Okay. Well, thank you very much to everyone. Adam, thanks for for presenting the highlights of that report. If anyone wants the the full report, scroll up in the chat. You’ll find the link there. We will email it out as part of the follow-up as well if you missed it. And we have lots of other great, interesting resources for you in this area. So we are publishing a series of corporate research guides on various different topics. We will be running one on innovation in a few months’ time. So keep an eye on that page if you wanna see, where we’re collating some of the best practices, and particularly the AI powered insights for innovation opportunities. You will be able to see lots of great examples of innovation focused insights, case studies, expert perspectives, you know, new approaches in our next major virtual event. So the next generation insights summit is happening in April. Lots of time to sign up for that. Loads of great presentations from around the world. And just to cap it off next week, if you are interested in slightly, adjacent but different perspectives on innovation, how do you approach this? This is a discussion about aligning UX research teams that have a very, you know, prototyping observation, led approach. I think particularly for the comment that we have from Octave, this sounds like this is more up your street for the kind of inspiration for for innovation. But why are UX research and market research teams separate organizations? Isn’t it time they came together? How can you actually enable that? So a good discussion we’ll have next week with some leaders from build dot com and Pixart. Not Pixart, unfortunately, but Pixart, which is a a a design app and, the product leader there who has some really good perspectives on this. So do come along. They’re all free, and I hope you’ll be back for some of our future events. But I just wanna say, to our partners in Market Logic, IPSOS, Richard, Adam, and Olaf and teams, thank you very much for taking the time, sharing your perspectives, a reengaging conversation. I hope those of you who joined us found it valuable as well, and enjoy the rest of your days wherever you are in the world. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Great. Thanks so much. Bye bye.