BC Business
Top 20 Innovators in BC, Vision Critical
Congratulations to Vision Critical, #11 in 2011's Most Innovative Companies in B.C.
The era of market researchers trying to gather a couple hundred survey responses using the telephone is, for the most part, dead, gone and unmourned. The world has moved on, and a Vancouver company has helped lead the way. Vision Critical has built an impressive high-end research service that relies on thousands of pre-chosen respondents organized into online panels who stand ready to turn around market surveys faster than any phone-based effort. Vision Critical is not the only research firm doing this, but as one of our panellists puts it, “There are not many companies that you can point to that are thought leaders around the world, and these guys are.”
Vision Critical earns yet another spot on the Innovators list (it ranked third last year) for expanding its services to clients without the budgets to engage these big online panels. Small business owners or marketing managers working on small projects already have a plethora of online tools with which to make their own home-made surveys, but Vision Critical’s Firefly Surveys aims to be a pro-level alternative. It allows a single author to manage a vast collaborative effort to craft the perfect survey, allowing dozens of stakeholders to easily share, edit and comment on a single online file in real time.
What makes this collaborative system truly powerful is the fact that clients can easily incorporate guidance from for-hire research specialists if they want that extra scientific heft. (Vision Critical, of course, is happy to offer its services.) And so, the same tool that can be used to throw together a quick-and-easy questionnaire can also help orchestrate a direction-setting statistical masterpiece.