In my career I have had the privilege of establishing an insights function from scratch twice, once for an Asia Pacific regional footprint in an established large global organization, and more recently in a young Singapore-based business.

These two experiences have been quite some years apart, so it has been interesting to reflect on the changes in the nature of the work, the skills needed in an insights team, the technology available for our work and the challenges faced by insights practitioners.

A lot has changed, however one thing that I feel is persistent is the challenge of really achieving “insights to action” and leveraging the cumulative value of insights work.

A phrase that regularly pops up on process frameworks, job descriptions, and roadmaps, “insights to action” refers to the shift that we expect to take place when decisions and actions are taken as the result of providing a new

One of the best investments any company striving to be more customer-centric can make is an insights engine.

A Harvard Business Review article describes insights engines as market research groups with a “fundamentally strategic role,” responsible for distilling insights that “enable transformational actions” for their organizations. We’ve defined an insights engine as “a combination of the right people, technology, and processes to increase the accessibility and visibility of insights, ultimately empowering stakeholders to make customer-centric decisions.”

In both definitions, the key is that research groups must be distilling and distributing insights in ways that drive meaningful business decisions. And that means organizations shouldn’t just be investing in conducting or commissioning research, but in ensuring the resulting insights are packaged, shared, and preserved in ways that maximize their value.

Implementing an insights management platform, which centralizes insights and makes them easily accessible to stakeholders, is often one of the first steps

Editor’s Note: Usually to end the year we post predictions from a variety of industry leaders. However, this year we decided to take a different tack and sit down with one of the true seers of the insights industry: Simon Chadwick, and to dive deep into a conversation on what the trends we saw play out in 2022 might mean for what we’ll see in 2023.

The full conversation can be found on the GreenBook Podcast, but for those who want a quick summary of the major ideas we experimented with the AI system ChatGPT to high points. Not only was the core interview fantastic, but the quality of the summary from the AI system is mind-blowingly good as well. Perhaps 2023 will be the year of AI? We shall see …

As the year 2022 comes to a close, it’s a good time to look back at the