This half-day seminar took place on 11^th November via Zoom and we were delighted to welcome a fantastic line up of market research experts to share with us their experiences of various innovations that are shaping the future of healthcare market research. 

The BHBIA thanks all our speakers, and also our delegates, for their engagement and some great questions during the afternoon.

Presenter Sarah Smith of Kantar reflected:

‘The BHBIA session was a great opportunity to hear about the current trends. There was a consistent theme around new technology, and it was great to hear some case studies about real-life experiences.’

In our first session, Voice: The Next Frontier, Abigail Stuart, Founding Partner and Dan Gallagher, Account Director, Day One Strategy explored what the future of market research could look like in an increasingly voice-driven world. They gave us a fascinating insight into how voice tech can help us collect richer data and analyse emotions, to help us better predict future behaviour.

Jonny Storey, Market Research Insights Manager, MRN (Medical Research Network), talked about Innovation and idea generation techniques applied to Pharma and share some examples of how they have been used to fast-track product and marketing development. He concluded that innovation is not in the technique, but in the ideas and insights generated. The key is getting people to think differently.

Kirsty Hope, Director and Ben Walker, Research Manager, Adelphi Research shared their experiences of Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Market Research and how AI will impact our industry going forward. They used anonymised case-studies to illustrate how AI can make research more agile through the use of platforms to capture insights quickly and at scale, and how AI can enhance the respondent experience and get deeper into the drivers of prescribing decisions.

In How digital tools are helping us drive behavioural science approaches, Sarah Smith, Global Practice Leader, Behavioural Science and Julien Goretti, Associate VP, Digital Lead, Kantar discussed how this year has accelerated the uptake of digital approaches, which has presented an opportunity both to get closer to ‘true’ behaviour in our research and to create digital interventions to drive change.  They discussed how the East Framework (a simple, pragmatic framework which stands for Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely, developed by the government’s Behavioural Insights Team) can aid the design of digital tools to support behaviour change.

In our penultimate session, Katy Irving, Global Head of Behavioural Science and Nicola Vyas, Research Director, HRW discussed Navigating Minefields of “the Implicit”.

Katy summed up:

“Although often touted in market research, methodologies designed to elicit ‘implicit’ or unspoken responses (like implicit association test, galvanic skin response, electroencephalography, facial coding and eye tracking) can be a minefield. We discussed with delegates how there are no methods that can ‘measure emotion’ and the significant considerations around reproducibility, sensitivity and validity. Finally, we looked at case studies for how in very specific instances application of these methods in tandem with other approaches can sometimes add value.”

The session was chaired by Vanessa Regester, Strategic Insights and Analytics Partner, Roche Products Ltd. Vanessa also shared a Pharma Perspective on Innovation. Vanessa explained that pharma companies have tread a pragmatic balance between excitement about the potential of a new innovation and consideration of the time, cost and compliance considerations. A critical issue is to ensure the insights are used by the organisation and that innovation is only valuable where it helps to answer a business question or problem – i.e. the importance of demonstrating the value.

Delegate feedback

We were really pleased with the attendance at this event, and the day was highly rated by our delegates.

Comments included:

“Very useful and relevant, very well presented”

“(Good opportunity to) connect with colleagues”.

We'll be running another Innovations session in November 2021, with a different set of topics. If any members are interested in presenting, we'd love to hear from you.