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I'll share a quote today that's relevent to my last post.  Enjoy the weekend. "Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts" -- Albert Einstein

I was advising a client on how to collect some qualitative and quantitative research. He wanted to combine all the questions into one survey.  I cautioned him about collecting too many qualitative responses, and suggested that we may want to do two separate...

My current client owns some of the world's largest online consumer communities in niche enthusiast segments.  Here are a few things I've learned about doing consumer research within established online communities.  I hope you find them useful....

Think about the last focus group you ran or attended.  Be honest with yourself.  Why did you have the focus group?  And what, exactly did you learn from it? I always tell my clients that focus groups serve a real, and valuable purpose, and that they...

I talk a lot about consumer insight: how to learn from consumers, how to derive insights, and how to translate them into useful criteria to guide decision-making.  I realized that I don't talk so much about how this connects to the design process, and...

I was looking over the last few blog posts and realized that the real purpose behind many of our innovation processes is to help us to work around traditional corporate reward systems.  Defining Active Thinking is a way to ascribe value to a process that many...

I'm on vacation next week, and will return the week of September 8th.  In the meantime I'll leave you with this thought:    

I was reading a discussion yesterday on a closed site I get to use where it was mentioned that perfectionism is what often holds people back from achieving their goals.  When I think about this in terms of the Active Thinking concepts we've been discussing,...

I have to clarify a point made in my last post about taking time to think.  I mentioned that clients tend to get nervous during the point in the project when they don't perceive that anything is happening, and that in fact, this thinking time is the most...

Insights are derived.  They are not observed, nor are they instant.  They take time. Regardless of the end goals, the most important part of a project is the time in-between the end of the research and before developing solutions.  This is probably true...