MRS and Savanta publish Intelligence Capital guidance

The report, Intelligence Capital 2020: A practitioner’s guide, has been produced by Savanta and includes interviews with Formula 1, Barclays, Google and BT, and a quantitative survey of client-side members of MRS and Association of Users of Research Agencies (AURA).    

According to the report, Intelligence Capital should be viewed as important to businesses as financial or human capital is currently, and research as the means to acquire and use it.

Once intelligence is gathered, the report says, organisations should make it universally available to inform decision-making while retaining its quality and robustness. 

Jane Frost, chief executive of MRS, said in a statement: “We are living through uncertain times, characterised by restricted opportunities and turbulent markets, and it is more critical than ever that businesses maximise their existing assets and differentiate themselves competitively. As we emerge into the new Covid-19 changed world, Intelligence Capital is the single most powerful tool at their disposal.” 

Speaking at a virtual launch event yesterday ( 21st May), Frost said the rationale for creating the term ‘Intelligence Capital’ was to ensure that the importance of research was recognised.

“What is very clear is that so few people are using Intelligence Capital as a source of competitive advantage,” Frost said. “Many people are still down at the mostly tactical and reactionary end of the market. Part of the role of Intelligence Capital is to create the dialogue to help them move up that value chain.”

Oliver Worsford, associate director at Savanta, said one in three clients are not convinced by the evidence and insights they see, and that making data more accessible could help if coupled with measures to improve understanding.

“If we want non-research people to use evidence in their decisions, then we need to broaden the access to those people,” Worsford said. “That is scary and presents its own challenges, and we need to build data competency, literacy and capability more broadly.”

Georgina White, group insight director at BT, discussed the importance of collaboration during the event. “Collaboration is a really important thing – there is a balance that is critical here. We know we have to engage and bring people with us,” she said. “But we also have to operate in an agile fashion and we can’t have every single voice involved. It is really critical that we think about who the stakeholders are.”

Also speaking at the report launch, Harry Davies, head of measurement and analytics at Google, said: “We need to get much better at making sure that not just the data and findings are accessible in databases, but also all of the debriefs and bits of work that happened alongside the process that move information into insight into things that are actionable are all in one place and easily accessible.”