The Burke Institute, a venerable market research institution with high quality training just embraced the future of the insights industry by offering a new course – Next Generation Qualitative Tools.

This is a noteworthy development.

The course will focus on social media, online communities and virtual research platforms.

Until now, the Burke Institute was fairly orthodox and conservative in its offerings. Their courses, all very solid, focused on surveys, focus groups and analytics – the traditional tools of the “Asking Epoch” of market research.

But, times change and most of market research is now behind advances of the wider insights industry. The market research industry may be struggling, but the wider insights industry is doing quite well and innovating rapidly.

The Burke Institute is a good proxy for tracking how traditional market research catches up.

I’m not criticizing them. They’re great folks that do great work. But they are playing catch up.

I anticipate that the Institute will roll out the following classes in the near future:

1. Mobile research tools and techniques
2. Insights Communities, UGC and Co-Creation (this deserves its own class)
3. Social media (again deserving its own class)
4. Neuromarketing or Biological Response Research
5. Eye Tracking in Ad, Packaging, Retail Environment and Menu Testing
6. Prediction Markets

Tracking the rapidity with which they roll out these new classes will be a good gauge of industry adoption.

In the meantime, market research professionals should support Burke’s evolution and attend the Sep. 30 – Oct. 1 class or send their junior staff. Send the market a signal. If the class oversubscribes dramatically, then the Burke Institute will react to the signal, offering more classes in this area andexpanding their new offerings.