Last week I spent two days at the MRS Annual Conference in London. The MRS has just changed its logo which now features the words, "Evidence Matters." I took that to be a reaction to a decade of emphasis on "insight" which at times seemed to translate to "evidence optional" or at least given us a free pass on serious evaluation of the evidence at hand. 
But alas, there was precious little evidence on display through most of the presentations. I'll give the presenters a break and blame the format which mostly allotted only 10 and occasionally 15 minutes to a presentation.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting two days. Most of the NewMR suspects were there–big data, social media, gamification, behavioral economics, netnography, neuromarketing. (More on the specifics of some of those in future posts.) There also were the increasingly-common entertaining but marginally-relevant keynoters.
If there was a big idea I think it was this: the most important challenge for our industry is not methodology but the need to change how we work with clients. Our role has always been to explain customers to our clients. Increasingly clients want more; they want to connect with those customers. Disintermediation probably is too strong a word but there were joint researcher-client presentations where the interaction between clients and consumers was so intimate that the audience wondered out loud if researchers might not eventually be left with little to do beyond the logistics of creating the opportunities for those interactions. Using the focus group metaphor, it's about getting clients from behind the glass and out into the room. And by clients I mean not just the people who commission the research but line managers from within the client company charged with implementation of the research findings. An all-day strategy session with line managers and research participants was one example of how this is being done. All in all we saw examples of how the research process is becoming less structured, more interactive, more iterative and ultimately more innovative. It makes understanding our clients' businesses as well as they do an absolute imperative. This is exciting stuff, even for a survey geek.