The Brits have Dragons’ Den, the Americans have Shark Tank – researchers get the Insight Innovation Competition, ostensibly a sideshow of the Festival of NewMR 2011 but in practice one of the biggest draws (personally speaking, at least).

The format will be familiar to fans of the two TV shows mentioned above. Six businesses were given 10 minutes each to pitch their concept at a panel of judges, three of whom stumped up $20,000 to invest in the best idea.

Walking off with the prize was Decooda, a company that started out analysing social media but has since developed an MR Assistant that automates the coding of open-ended responses within surveys.

Here’s Decooda explaining how it works:

“Clients start by uploading their raw data file, which may include branching and skip logic questions and any related metadata. We automatically parse the file into questions and their associated responses and metadata. Next, the client can select the number of categories they want responses to be assigned, so that responses with multiple attributes can be auto-coded into multiple categories. Our 100% automated natural coding process then clusters responses into groups of related documents. These document sets can then be easily manipulated to the analysts liking by merging, renaming or deleting clusters.”

Text analytics also allows the open-ends to be scored on sentiment, emotion and context. You can read Decooda’s full pitch here.

Second was the iPhone survey app PollBob, which presented a bold vision for the future of location-based quick polls at a price point that might appeal to small business owners. But a small user base – 6,000 people spread across North America – and a host of rivals, including Opinionaided and Wayin, weighed against it.

PollBob’s pitch is here. In joint third place was Research Through Gaming and Inon, in fifth place Insightpool and in sixth place AIMgen Lab.