Versta Research Is Five Years Old!
Last week, Versta Research celebrated its 5th birthday—an important milestone in a twenty-year journey that has involved rigorous training and building significant capabilities that help clients solve research problems.
<<Applause! Singing! Cake!>> “Speech! Speech!”
Hmmmm, a speech. . . . Well, recently we formulated new year’s resolutions and described where we are headed as we enter the second half of a decade. So how about if we look back and highlight five accomplishments—one for each candle on the cake—that now define us as a company?
1. Deep understanding. The name Versta is derived from the social science concept Verstehen (literally to understand), which refers to “understanding the meaning of action from the actor’s point of view.” While most of our work is quantitative, numbers are not enough. We work hard to find meanings that yield deeper understandings of the issues at hand.
2. Turning data into stories. Our approach means finding the story in the data and building insights and reports around those stories. From the very beginning of each project, we help customers communicate their research to managers, clients, and to the internal and external audiences they need to reach.
3. Academic expertise and brainpower. We launched our business after investing more than a decade in academic teaching and research, and we are still engaged with that world as we publish in scholarly journals. The value of academic expertise lies not only in the rigors of training, but also in the cross-fertilization of new ideas and advanced techniques that inform our work.
4. Adaptation and innovation. Staying aggressively focused on the questions that need to be answered helps open up thinking to new tools, techniques, and emerging applications that may be useful—like text analysis of social media, or new statistical analysis packages that are more powerful (and less expensive!) than current ones.
5. Proven success. We are helping companies, agencies, and organizations like Fidelity Investments, American Express, Pfizer, Kraft, Samsung, OfficeMax, Tribune Company, and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, to name just a few. We work with them to solve their toughest research problems, and we are delighted that our work helps them succeed.
<<Applause!>> “Make a wish and blow out the candles!”
Hmmm, should we wish for five more years, or ten, or lay out all the great things we can accomplish by then? How about this modest wish instead: We hope that you will turn to Versta Research for your next research effort. Let us lay out a detailed and innovative research plan, execute in ways that you wish every vendor would, and help you turn all of that messy, complicated, detailed data into clear, compelling, and useful insights. That will be cause for singing and celebration for sure!
