What is your research type?
Greenbook’s 2012 GRIT report was released yesterday including this year’s list of the top 50 companies mentioned as being most innovative by researchers. I have to admit it was nice to see Anderson Analytics in the top 15 even though NGMR did not officially participate in the study. We dropped a bit from last year, possibly also because our focus is now more and more on OdinText, our patent pending text analytics platform.

That said, what interests me most about this research, and any research really, is less about who is #1 or #2 …, as that can be a bit of a numbers game and hard to gauge accurately depending on sample source etc. Instead what I find most interesting are relative differences within any given sample. The Quad Maps below showing what kind of researchers mentioned a specific company are an example of this kind of insight. I compared this year vs. last year to see what kind of movement, if any, there was.

It was a bit difficult at first as the X and Y axis were in different positions from last year, but quadrants are basically the same, and there are also 15 firms rather than 10 listed in this year. So in order to make visual year to year comparison I’ve just inverted the 2012 image below for quick comparison.

Interestingly, almost all firms in 2012 are still in the same quadrants as they were in 2011. I suppose this is to be expected. Firms can’t change their positioning too quickly, and arguably why would they want to.

There is only one exception, Ipsos has moved into the more “experimental” side of the chart. Not sure why this is, though I think they’ve been doing some relatively innovative things recently (they did receive an NGMR Award this year for their ‘WAR’ methodology, and were joint winners for their joint work with Mobile/GPS the year before).

Other than this insight I also found it curious that none of the new firms were in the “More Quant/Established-Traditional” Quadrant. All the new firms are in one of the other three quadrants. Can it be that is what customers want now, either more qualitative or more experimental research?

Curious to hear which of these four quadrants you think you as a researcher would fall into?

I’m guessing you can guess which one I’m in 😉

@TomHCAnderson
@OdinText