Wednesday 18 November 2026 · Festival of NewMR
Innovation Day
Three global sessions. New ideas, new methods and new possibilities for insights.
Innovation Day sits at the heart of the Festival of NewMR — a day dedicated to exploring what is changing in research and insights, what is becoming possible, and what leading practitioners are doing differently.
Across three sessions spanning APAC, Europe/India and the Atlantic, we will bring together researchers, innovators and industry leaders to share practical examples, emerging approaches and ideas that could shape what comes next.
The programme is still growing, with more speakers and presentations to be announced.
Date
Wednesday 18 November 2026
Sessions
Three global broadcasts
Format & price
Live online and free
Choose your session
Join the session that works best for your region — or join us more than once as the programme moves around the world.
Programme
Ideas and innovation across three sessions
Explore the presentations announced so far. More speakers and session details will be added as the programme develops.
Session 1 · Wednesday 18 November
APAC
10:00 am Sydney
Rethinking Insights for an AI-First World
Co-founder, NewMR
AI is changing much more than the tools researchers use. It has the potential to reshape how organisations generate insight, the skills they need and even where the insights function sits. This session explores what happens as synthetic data, conversational analysis and increasingly end-to-end AI-enabled research become part of everyday practice.
What will researchers still do themselves? Which new capabilities will matter? How will hiring and team structures change? And as the boundaries between research, data, technology and decision-making shift, what might the insights function of the future look like?
Mental and Machine Availability: Putting System Zero to Work for Brand Growth
Founder, Sprout Strategy
System 1 and System 2 are deeply embedded in how we understand brands: what people instinctively feel and what they consciously consider. As AI shapes how brands are discovered, considered and chosen, System Zero adds a new dimension: how machines interpret, represent and recommend brands.
Elisa has spent the past 12 months conducting research, testing systems and working through how to bring System Zero into our brand tracking and wider research ecosystem, and putting it into practice, learning where the pitfalls sit and how this intelligence can help clients unlock new growth.
In this session, Elisa will share that experience and explore how to bring System Zero into your own research ecosystem. From measuring mental and machine availability together to identifying opportunities for growth, the focus is on practical application: what to measure, how to integrate it and how to turn the findings into action.
Session 2 · Wednesday 18 November
Europe / India
10:00 am London
Simulating Tomorrow for Coca-Cola’s Advanced Hydration Portfolio
Chief Innovation Officer, Human8
Coca-Cola’s global innovation programme for its Advanced Hydration portfolio (2027–2030) combined human insight, cultural foresight, creative methods and AI across six markets to build an innovation playbook with three strategic platforms, six big-bet concepts and a clear portfolio architecture.
To keep development consumer-centric, the team created Twin Communities — secure digital representations for ongoing engagement — and later Future Twin Communities to test how ideas evolve in future market conditions. Synthetic data did not replace research, but enabled capabilities that were previously impossible, strengthening both foresight and decision-making.
Beyond Demographics and OCEAN: Building AI Personas That Behave
Mass Cognition
Most AI personas are a demographic profile and a personality score wrapped in a prompt, closer to a horoscope than an AI representation of a consumer segment. They sound convincing but they drift toward the AI model’s default voice. This session sets out the basic principles of AI persona engineering: determining AI persona content, 3 ways AI personas can fail and testing AI personas: authenticity and behavioural fidelity. Finally there is a brief analysis of the advantages of AI personas vs Digital Twins.
Session 3 · Wednesday 18 November
Atlantic
3:00 pm London
Digital Twins: From Theory to Practice
Ipsos
David Priestley
Ipsos
The story of Ipsos’s journey to test the potential of digital twins in real-world research. We will explore how our collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, combined with extensive experimentation across a range of research tasks, has helped us understand where digital twins perform well, where their limitations lie, and what is required to use them reliably and responsibly.
AI has eyes now. What should researchers do with them?
NOVA at MMR Research Worldwide
CTI Senior Technologist, pladis Global
Generative AI has largely entered research through language: transcripts, open ends and conversations. But video opens another possibility. AI can observe behaviour.
Using a real pladis Global study of natural biscuit consumption, we explore what changes when AI moves from listening to consumers to watching what they actually do. Where does it add genuine research value? Where does it get things wrong? And what becomes more important, not less, about the researcher?
More speakers to be announced
Innovation Day will feature additional presentations across all three sessions. We’ll be adding more speakers, topics and session details as the programme develops.
Be part of Innovation Day
Presentation opportunities are available
We are reserving a limited number of presentation opportunities for organisations with something genuinely innovative to share with the global research and insights community.
Innovation Day is designed for practical case studies, emerging approaches, new tools, new methodologies and new ways of thinking about insight.
If your organisation has work that deserves a place in the programme, we would love to hear from you.
Innovation Day is part of the Festival of NewMR
Join researchers, insight professionals, clients, innovators and future-focused thinkers from around the world for ideas, learning and conversations across the week about the future of insights and research.
Explore the full Festival programme
