Nominations Open For 2014 Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards

The Research Liberation Front (RLF) announces that it is accepting nominations for the 2014 Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage awards.

The awards, an industry first, were launched in London in 2012 to recognize exceptional bravery in the market research industry. They are named after the late Ginny Valentine, the “ultimate revolutionary” who established semiotics in the UK as a legitimate market research tool in the 1990s. In this their third year the awards travel to Atlanta as a collaboration between the Research Liberation Front and GreenBook, a champion of innovation in research.

In the video below, John Griffiths describes why an award was established in Ginny’s name:

The winners will be announced in Atlanta in June 2014 at the Insight Innovation Exchange of market research innovators.

Unlike conventional market research awards, which typically celebrate marketing success or the rigor of a clever methodology, the Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage is awarded to those who fought long odds and showed exceptional determination to produce great market research which informs and inspires.  The awards are designed to recognize researchers wherever they work – within client companies or as suppliers.

You can submit nominations and vote on current nominations using a crowdsourcing ideation approach here: http://kl.grupthink.com/.

Nominations are open through to April 30^th 2014.

Bravery takes many forms: developing a new approach; struggling with a difficult brief;  undertaking cultural research methodologies such as semiotics and ethnography; setting up new venture; pushing through controversial projects; pioneering new approaches in a client organization, even physical danger, to name a few. In all cases, the panel will look for nominees with persistence, drive, and guts.

Anyone can nominate someone for a bravery award. From anywhere in the world. As long as the area is research. You can even nominate yourself!  Nominators need to explain in up to 500 words why they think the nominee should receive a bravery award, and post this on our crowdsourcing board at: http://kl.grupthink.com/.

The public will then vote on which nominees make it to the shortlist. The final decisions will be made by our fearless panel:

• Ana Alvarez, Senior Director Insights, PepsiCo Latin American Beverages
• Catherine Willis, Customer Research Manager, Delta Air Lines
• Betty Adamou, CEO and Founder, Research Through Gaming
• Alison White, Managing Director, Face Facts

The judges’ decisions will be revealed at Ginny Valentine Bravery awards ceremony at the Insight Innovation Exchange, Atlanta

This award is ideal for managers and research sponsors looking to recognize the work of team members or other stakeholders. You can find more information about the 2013 awards on the crowdsourcing site or at www.researchliberationfront.com

Speaking on the launch of the third year of the awards, John Griffiths from the Research Liberation Front commented:

“The Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage awards won a new group of supporters after the ceremony in New York last year when winners included a researcher at Unilever who had launched a global accreditation program to improve standards which wasn’t universally welcomed by suppliers and a researcher who was bombed out of her offices in Pakistan because of the healthcare research she was doing.  Another winner Catalina Mejia who was running community surveys in Colombia under the noses of FARC guerrillas, is speaking at the IiEX LATAM this week in Santiago and will be one of a panel at the event to encourage the nomination of brave researchers now the nominations are open. These awards are really quite unlike other industry awards and the winners have the satisfaction of knowing they will inspire others in the industry to do better braver work.”