Innerscope Research Inc

Geoffrey K. Gill, Chief Financial Officer/Vice President, Strategy for Innerscope Research Inc. (ISR), addressed the question “What should be our next step?” daily while sitting in his office, not far from Boston's North Station. During the three years he had been with the company, ISR had established itself as a leading competitor in the emerging efforts to apply biometrics to predict consumer behavior. Using algorithms and techniques developed by its founders—Dr. Carl Marci, Director of Social Neuroscience for the Psychotherapy Research Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and Brian Levine, whose project involving the use of multiplatform sensing technology at the MIT Media Lab was a major source of inspiration for ISR’s products—the company had demonstrated how biometric signals (e.g., pulse, respiration, galvanic skin response) could be combined to produce important insights into individual reactions to advertisements, web pages, new products, and print media. Its client list looked like a “who’s who” of major advertisers (see Exhibit 1 for some examples). The company had recently established a strategic relationship with Ipsos, one of the largest market research firms in the world (and the market leader in TV advertisement research). Leveraging that relationship, the ISR’s proprietary technologies could potentially be employed in the evaluation of tens of thousands of TV advertisements each year. It was hard to imagine how a small business, with fewer than 40 employees and less than 5 years old, could have experienced a more promising start.