The award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding leadership as change agents and made significant contributions to harnessing disruptive innovation – technological, methodological or otherwise – to drive research industry progress.
“Neil exemplifies what the NGMR awards were designed to highlight – innovative, disruptive thinking”, says Kristin Luck, President and CMO at Decipher. “His work with RIWI, along with his big picture vision of how data can be utilized in new ways to create new, industry leading, sample methods, is truly visionary.”
“I conceived RIWI, first used for government-commissioned surveillance and prevention during SARS in Fall 2009, to solve a problem I have been obsessed with since the dawn of the Web: How do you find continuous random survey respondents from every corner of the globe, most of whom typically or never answer surveys? By doing that, RIWI completes the data picture. There are lots of panels of self-selected people who get rewarded to answer surveys. There is the ‘Big Data’ wisdom of the highly opinionated crowds in selected markets whose Web postings can be snooped on to gather fit-for-purpose insights. RIWI fills in the giant hole in the middle, and, in the process, enables all-device, all-country response data to manage and forecast risk, to capture brand intelligence, and to get the best quality data available from the most diverse survey set available to mankind: the vast growing world of Web users.”
“For any company that takes data seriously, the randomness, global reach and ability to survey non-habitual survey-takers enables insights into what works and does not. If you are a senior decision-maker and have to determine how best to measure product or brand efficacy, you have a number of choices. The excitement of the data world today enables you to do all three. Three dominant options present themselves now to gather large samples:
A. The opinions of the narrow spectrum of Web users who randomly sign up to a panel and who do so in order to get paid or get rewards.
B. The opinions of people answering questions on a game or because they downloaded a game.
C. RIWI, with 70% of our respondents globally never or rarely having answered surveys…enabling the Holy Grail: randomness, ongoing monitoring and forecasting.”
Neil leads RIWI’s work in developing new global data capture and prediction innovations that leverage the architecture of the Internet, notably, the domain name system (DNS).
Neil is a Senior Fellow at Massey College in the University of Toronto, and teaches on Internet trends at the University of Toronto, in the faculties of public health and health policy.
For further information about the NGMR Disruptive Innovator Award, click here.