Text Analytics Platform Provider Decooda Wins The Insights Innovation Competition

Few things in this world make me as happy as seeing good things happen to smart people, on Friday a whole lot of good happened for many great folks as The Festival of NewMR wrapped up with the 1st ever Insights Innovation Competition put on by GreenBook and NewMR.

Six great companies: Research Through Gaming, AimGen Labs, Pollbob, Decooda, InsightPool, and Inon made it through to the finals to present their ideas to the world and our panel of judges. Thousands of people were exposed to their brands and concepts all through the competition and on Friday both the judges and everyone watching the competition from home voted to award one of them $20,000 to support their efforts.A special thanks to our sponsors of Cint, Survey Analytics, and VisionCritical; without their generous support none of this would have been possible.

Each of the companies competing gave great presentations on some truly innovative concepts; each of them had what it took to win the main prize, but there could be only one winner. I was rooting for every company participating but had recused myself from the voting process to ensure it was fair and transparent, so all I could do was stand by and watch as each of these worthy companies did their best to convince the judges that they had the best idea.  After a tough scoring process by the judges and factoring in the popular vote, the unequivocal winner by a significant margin was start-up text analytics platform provider Decooda!

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been following Decooda for quite some time and that I am also an Advisor to them, so this win was also a bit of personal validation as well: 6 industry leaders that I respect immensely, as well as all of the participants tuned in, clearly saw the same potential that I did many months ago. I have to say that the result was also in line with the recent GRIT report findings: text analytics is poised to experience massive growth and have a profound impact on market research. Decooda will be a big part of that transformation.

It is my belief that each of the other companies will play a part in reshaping the industry as well: gamification, mobile, behavioral economics, social media influence scoring, and cognitive analysis will be playing an increasingly large role in market research, and the firms who were runners up in the competition are certainly poised to lead in their respective disciplines.

Congratulations to every company that competed; these are the emerging leaders of market research and I can’t wait to see what they do next!