Five Ideas That Matter

Mary Meeker‘s presentation from Tuesday’s Web 2.0 summit is rapidly approaching Sequoia momentum (mementum?), but still worth a good close look for anyone that’s been living in a cave for the last couple of days.

Great data in particular on the underplayed market potential of mobile, although readers will not be surprised to learn that we view the heavy emphasis on Apple with some skepticism

Mary Meeker’s Internet Presentation 2009

We’re interested in Metatrends partly for their potential to deliver untapped insights, and partly because we’ve lost confidence that traditional quantitative market research can deliver bread and butter insights in a convincing way.

The frequency which which we read about badly applied primary research methodologies is depressing, and even more depressing is the fact that examples of bad methods – such as television audience measurement – have attained institutional acceptance through inertia.

Commercial market research is a mature discipline, but while methods and resources to collect and mine data have evolved, program design has barely changed at all.

There are two widespread problems with traditional commercial research, split between sampling errors and respondent errors.

Sampling errors are usually the result of a compromise between scope and budget. For example, prestigious and respected surveys such as Fortune’s Most Admired Companies – based on a survey of only around 4,000 people.

Respondent errors are a hangover from another age, when there were no other ways to gather opinion than to ask people what they thought. The problem: people won’t always tell you the truth – because of embarrassment, malice or any of a number of other reasons. Gaming surveys has even become popular as a form of subversive act. The best possible example of this problem are election exit polls – notoriously volatile, and consequently hard to rely on.

Our experiments in metatrend analysis are rooted in the belief that there could be another, better way to measure trends – built on opinion, attitude and intention signals that can be mined online.

We’re building our method as we go – testing out a range of open and licensed data sources, acquisition and analysis tools for effectiveness. A methodology white paper will follow in the next few weeks, but what is certain is that it will not be a sacred cow. We plan to avoid the same stagnant rut as traditional market research: as tools, resources and processing capabilities evolve, so will we.

The Harvard Business Review this month has a couple of sections on trends in an issue devoted to the new world business order.

One of our obsessions on fiveideas is/will be to collect and collate trends from elsewhere. These are interesting because the HBR headlines themas 10 Trends You Have To Watch. The authors  (Eric Beinhocker, Ian Davis, and Lenny Mendonca) all work with McKinsey Global Institute.

The trends are:

• Globalisation under fire
• Resources under strain
• Trust in business running out
• Management science under question as data models prove unequal to the task in banking
• Shifting consumption patterns
• A bigger role for Government
• Asia rising
• Leading companies reshaping their industries during recession
• Innovation having less momentum
• Price stability under threat.

The observation I want to make about the list is its eclectic quality. I think there are far more profound forces at work and I think these trends are not supported by good data but that anyway is often the case with trend forecasting. It’s the eclectic nature I believe diffuses the focus.

Which of these trends is a result of recession, which are contributories to recession and which are not really related to recession? And are any of them as significant as, for example, the tendency of the web to create irrational markets? Now that is a permanent feature of human activity that we haven’t begun to understand.

A stalled commitment to innovation on the other hand is a very temporary phenomenon and could hardly be called, convincingly, a widespread trend.  Falling trust in business – is it temporary or permanent and if so what are the consequences? A larger role for Government, equally.

We need trend analysis that uncovers new developments so the list leaves me wanting a debate with the authors to uncover what is new. Where can I do that? Here at landscape.hbr.org I’m going there now.