In the past few years 'Agile' became a new Buzz word in the Market Research Industry. As in many other disciplines the principle of Agile, as originally defined for software development by Jeff Sutherland et al. in 2001, offers great new opportunities. With this article, I will try to explain why this presents one of the biggest opportunities for our market today.

If I say that in the past 20 years the availability of information has been one of the major game changers, I am sure you will agree. But what information has come available? You will most likely say "about everything". And yes, you are right. Now we all will agree that Google played an important role in that. They made it possible to find it all. I am also sure that Google had no idea on the impact their technology had when they started, nor the users had any idea. But the availability of data only has fueled many businesses over the past 2 decades. You could say you can only start to imagine what you can do with something when you actually can experience it.

You probably heard it before... when working in the Market Research Industry you are frequently confronted with questions like "Can you send me the dataset?". Though this seems to be such a valid and logical question, it also gives you an insight into the typical issues in market research businesses.

This question means that you have to generate a dataset snapshot of a running project. This snapshot is then distributed, and as of that moment, any change in the source of the snapshot (like newly completed interviews, or codings) will not be in the included. This has massive implications on the internal processes of your market research organization, but I talked about it in our previous post.

Waiting for a file or document is something of the past century. Especially in a business process the transfer of information is one of the major obstacles. Ever since Google Docs (and Office 365) have been around we all have learned that collaborate (parallel) access to a document works far better than single (serial) access.

As we learned in our previous blog post, approximately 2.5 trillion million bytes of data are collected - both actively and "passively" - on a typical day here on Planet Earth. (To give you some perspective on the magnitude of that figure, 2.5 trillion million equals 1 quintillion^A or 1 x 10¹⁸.) And as we continue to develop additional data touch points to add to those that already intersect with our lives each day, such as sensors, retail checkout registers, social media, and RFID tags, the amount of data we collect will just continue to expand exponentially.