Top 7 Highlights on Collaboration between Researchers and Start-ups

This summer has been very productive in terms of growing my experience on how consumer insights experts can accelerate start-ups growth. One of the biggest highlights of this journey is definitely The First Prize won in the frames of Research Rally organised by ESOMAR in Paris.

It was also a great privilege to share my experience from Research Rally in Paris and London as well as my overall experience with start-ups during the 70th ESOMAR Congress in Amsterdam this September.

Below are the key highlights from my presentation.

As the first thing, researchers and a start-up should identify together the key business issue where in-depth understanding of consumers and/or market is needed. For this purpose, it can be extremely helpful to calculate the Size of the Price or potential ROI behind various business ideas and focus on the most promising one.

As a next step, it’s vital to identify a key target, which can be in terms of market, consumer or a particular customer segment.

Working on a research project it’s very important for an insights expert to combine different sources of data in order to generate in depth insights. This means, that quite often start-ups already have some amount of very valuable internal data that can be combined with some sources of the secondary data at the first place, and then ad-hoc research can shed the light on the questions that need further investigation.

As start-ups don’t have a lot of experience in working with research professionals, it’s very important for insights experts to become advocates of consumer thinking rather than stay in a position of a research methodologist. At the end, it will become very beneficial for the further start-ups development.

Enjoying insights journey with start-ups it’s quite critical for insights experts to think lean, be agile and at the end of the project pitch insights rather than share a traditional long presentation with research results.