Posted on Wed, May 16, 2012
The pharmaceutical industry is facing a future of declining profits, reduced pipeline success and increased external scrutiny. This changing environment puts added pressure on companies to do more and more—with less resources. “...We’re being asked to get closer to the customer...explore these niche therapeutic areas for growth and also expand into emerging markets,” said Jeff Gustaitis, Director of Marketing Research, Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals.
Gustaitis and Charu Chaturvedi, Senior Vice President, Affinnova Life Sciences tackled these challenges head-on in a breakout session entitled Fuelling Collaborative Innovation on a Global Scale—An International Case Study.
Their case study featured an approach to collabora- tive innovation that overcame internal and external challenges to deliver clear and actionable, innovative results—on a global scale.“A lot of people think of innovation as this ambig- uous word...it’s all about creativity, it’s not measurable, it’s nothing tangible,” said Chaturvedi. “That’s actually not true. Innovation...should always be systematic; if it’s not, then you have no way of actually knowing if innovation is helping or hurting you.”
Please register for an upcoming webinar on this case study.
Posted on Tue, Apr 24, 2012
Let’s just put it out there: I am an unabashed fan of Affinnova. I think they are a VERY smart company and are a prime example of the type of firm that will flourish in the future of market research. After reading this interview with CEO Waleed Al-Atraqchi I think you’ll see why. - Lenny F. Murphy, Editor, GreenBook Blog
LFM: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, Waleed. Affinnova is one of the great research success stories of the past few years, but I suspect lots of people don’t actually know the full story. How did the company start and how did you get to where you are today?
WAA: The initial inspiration for Affinnova came from Noubar Afeyan and Kamal Malek, our founders. They tell the story best, but ultimately they recognized that combining evolutionary computation with the collective mind of the Internet could revolutionize how products are designed.
The company was started in 2000 and in the first few years we built the basis of the optimization technology we have today, for which we hold multiple patents. Commercialization began in 2004, and I joined in 2005.
Since then we’ve experienced tremendous growth and at a macro level I think we owe it to focus. Because innovation optimization is a game changer and the market is huge, our goal is very clear – own the market. We never lose sight of this. Day in and day out, we work hard to deliver new and improved technologies that make optimization increasingly valuable to existing and new customers.
In specific terms, our growth is being fueled by increasing adoption and expansion into new industries and international markets. By deploying our optimization technology as a Software-as-a-Service offering, which we announced in January, we are rapidly scaling at the enterprise level. We now have offices in Europe and plans for Asia and South America, and a growing base of customers in consumer goods, services, retail, technology and life sciences.
Continued on GreenBook.
Posted on Tue, Apr 10, 2012
The use of qualitative research to inform new product development was the core idea in a presentation by Jeffrey Henning of Affinova at the 2012 NewMR Qualitative Event.
This is not a new idea. Probably the most common methods for testing new consumer product ideas, at least in the initial phase, are qualitative (focus groups, IDIs, etc.). More often than it should, qualitative research is used as the only base to make decisions about which products to launch, but sometimes it is followed by traditional quantitative concept testing (monadic, sequential, etc.).
Henning suggests going a step further by doing product optimization, using conjoint analysis or evolutionary algorithms, where all ideas are considered in multiple combinations and a particular combination becomes the winning product. Henning cited research on research showing that on average, product optimization doubles new product success rates and generates more than two times revenue.
Continued on Relevant Insights.
Posted on Tue, Apr 03, 2012
Traditionally it doesn’t matter whether you are the first or last respondent to take a survey. What you see is a function of how you answer the questions. But an increasing number of surveys use input from the crowd to shape the experience of subsequent respondents, so what the last person sees is shaped by how the first person answered.
This is a new frontier for expansion of online surveys and represents a fertile field of exploration for survey computing professionals.
Continued on Research Magazine.
Posted on Sat, Mar 17, 2012
A few hours ago GigaOm published an article declaring “Marketing is the next big money sector in technology”. The author, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures, sets up the future of the industry this way: “For the first time in history, businesses can leverage big data for the benefit of driving marketing insights. We are at the very beginning of this wave, but this fundamental shift will create several multi-billion dollar winners. And a set of technology companies will emerge as the marketing equivalents of Salesforce and SAP.”
In New England, and the Boston area in particular, we’ve seen the big data / analytics and marketing optimization software wave coming for a long time. It’s a credit to the innovative regional culture that in many ways favors problem solving for infrastructure and the enterprise. And slowly but surely people have begun to take notice nationally...
...[One] success story is Affinnova, a marketing innovation firm based in Waltham, which was recently named one of the 50 most innovative companies in market research.
Continued on GigaOm.
Posted on Fri, Mar 16, 2012
These are the Top 50 firms submitted by GRIT respondents as the most innovative in the industry. The goal of this avenue of inquiry is to glean insight on the drivers of perception around what makes a firm innovative in order to understand how MR firms are capitalizing on the idea of “innovation” to grow their businesses. We believe that this list, developed by our peers within the industry, is a true measure of how successfully these companies are leveraging this brand attribute…. Discriminant analysis was run to understand how best to predict the profile of respondents who would consider firms as being most innovative. We focused on the most mentioned 15 brands for purposes of the analysis.
[Respondents who selected Affinnova tended to be more open to experimentation and more quantitatively oriented than respondents who did not. Affinnova was also on the 2011 list of innovators.]
Continued on GreenBook.
Posted on Thu, Mar 08, 2012
A recent study by Affinnova Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based software and services company, found that products created using innovation software for concept optimization have the potential to be twice as successful as those that are not created using the software. The software allows for a wider assessment of every aspect of a product’s development — including branding, positioning, features, packaging and more.
In the study, Affinnova said it reviewed 73 consumer packaged goods launched between 2003 and 2008, comparing the launches of those that were developed using innovation software for concept-optimization technology to the launches of those that did not. According to the company, products developed using innovation software for concept optimization had a launch rate of 55 percent, compared to an industry average of 27 percent. Of the optimized products that launched, 44 percent of them achieved significant sales through their first 24 months on the market — compared to a 25 percent success rate for the others.
Continued on Progressive Grocer Store Brands.
Posted on Fri, Mar 02, 2012
Somewhere along the line between brainstorming and testing new ideas in the marketplace, your research is failing. Here's why.
Companies of all sizes spend inordinate amounts of time and effort in testing their marketing: names, packaging, concepts, feature lists, colors, flavors... you name it, you can test it.
So I was quite surprised when Jeff Henning, CMO at Affinnova and an expert in market research (and an old friend), passed along a recent study his company did. The conclusion? Most of that product research gets only average results in the market. By and large, you would do just as well flipping a coin.
The problems start with brainstorming
Affinnova studied 100 testing campaigns that its clients had done in the past. Typically the testing process went like this: A company came up with a long list of potential ideas to test, whittled it down using mostly executives' intuition, and then tested the much shorter list of ideas. Affinnova, on the other hand, took the initial brainstorming list and tested everything on it, presenting the ideas in groups and asking participants to select their favorites.
Continued on Inc.com
Posted on Wed, Feb 08, 2012
US— Research technology firm Affinnova has launched a new web-based platform for marketing and research teams to collaborate on ideas for products, designs and ad campaigns.
Affinnova’s Concept Studio provides an online visual workspace to create and manage ideas. Users are encouraged to submit a wide variety of alternative concepts, and resist the temptation to move too quickly toward a consensus. Assessing and gradually honing these divergent ideas is more likely to lead to highly successful ones eventually being picked out, the firm says.
Nutrisystem, which sells a weight-loss products, has already used Concept Studio to optimise the messaging it used to promote a new weight-loss programme.
Continued on Research Magazine.
Posted on Wed, Jan 25, 2012
Concept testing and forecasting software specialist Affinnova has launched a web-based application called the ‘Concept Studio’, designed to accelerate concept development for new products, designs and ad campaigns.
Affinnova helps clients identify ideas with the best potential from a wide range of options, then compares them to relevant benchmarks and competitor concepts based on consumer preference. The firm’s new Concept Studio provides an ‘innovation space’ where users can create a range of potential marketing ideas for branding, positioning, imagery, messaging and packaging.
Continued on MrWeb.
