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Editor's note: Robyn Clayton is a director in Ipsos’ qualitative practice, based in Cincinnati. This article was aided by additional research from Emma Grand, global product manager.

Resolutions are all the rage at the start of a new year. We invest a great deal of time and effort deciding which resolutions to make and the strategies we are going to use to stick to them. We even invest money to help make them happen. And not surprisingly, following a holiday season often marked by too much of too many good things, many of us focus on slimming down. Year after year after year weight loss tops the resolution list. And 2019 is no different: Ipsos data shows 50 percent of Americans plan to lose weight this year.

At Ipsos, we believe that businesses should also consider a resolution to slim down – and not in the usual places like staffing and resources. Instead they should consider solving the large and ever-growing problem of infobesity. In this article, we will explore infobesity, how curation can help cure it and why and how to get started.

Infobesity (also known as information overload, infoxication and information explosion) is a term used to describe how difficult it is to understand an issue and make decisions effectively when one has too much information.

Just how big of a problem is infobesity? One of the first people to analyze the growth of knowledge was inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller. In his book Critical Path, he estimated before the 20th century, information was doubling approximately every century. In the mid-1900s, that speed increased significantly, with information doubling every 25 years or so. By the turn of the 21st century, the time it took to double information was reduced to one to two years.

IBM predicts that by 2020, knowledge will double every 11 to 12 hours.

But it’s not just the increasing speed of data that is feeding the infobesity epidemic. This explosion in the amount of information available is also being exacerbated by major changes in the data and business worlds. Data has moved from clean and structured to messy and unstructured. It now includes user-generated content, new and different formats and changes in both syntax and meaning. At the same time, businesses need to accelerate the speed and agility with which they respond to an endless array of new challenges. Companies are finding their categories more competitive than ever before, with new competitors as barriers to entry lower. The landscape of influence has changed, shifting from institutions to individuals. Consumers are more demanding as well; they want personalized products that meet their individual needs and they want them on their terms. Corporate researchers are trying to address all of these demands, often with fewer resources and dwindling budgets.

Infobesity is the result of a perfect storm that manifests itself through a variety of symptoms, including:

• silos where different categories or markets don’t share insights;
• researchers spending too much of their extremely limited time wading through data trying to get to an answer that may or may not exist in a useful format;
• difficulty connecting the dots across data sources/projects, often resulting in the same research being done multiple times and adding needless time and budget to projects.

All of which adds to a glut of new reports/results in an already overloaded system, contributing to the infobesity epidemic.

Solution is curation

So how do you solve a problem like infobesity? Old solutions based only on primary research can no longer address the need for speed, agility and impact. At our firm, we believe that today’s world requires companies move up the knowledge hierarchy by transforming their existing data into insight and effectively using this insight to make decisions and create business impact. This new challenge demands a new solution. And that solution is curation.

At its core, curation is about creating clarity and making the right insights available to the right person at the right time to enable positive, sustainable business impact. It focuses on primarily utilizing, paring down and transforming existing – and often disparate – data types and sources to help answer key business challenges and questions quickly and directly with actionable strategies for key audiences.

There are three key steps to this transformation:

Focus less on collecting data, more on connecting insight.  There’s a fundamental shift from this disruption that means that collecting data needs to be less of a focus. There is already a ton of data easily available, so the data itself becomes entry stakes. Data and research are still important but they are not nearly enough. Now it is about integrating multiple data sets to uncover insights and tensions.

Use the lens of the business and consumer to build potential strategy and action scenarios. Researchers cannot stop at insights; insights are the means but not the end. Researchers need to take it to the next level to build potential strategy and scenarios. This requires a consumer-centric lens to put the insight into sharper focus, followed by the business, brand and category lenses to ensure the indicated actions address the original business need.

Share in a way that stakeholders can easily consume and create impact.  At the end of the day, the insights job is about impacting business decisions. Therefore, the curation job doesn’t stop at the insight and recommendation. It not only has to matter, it has to be memorable and actionable. This involves using rich storytelling and multimedia assets such as images and videos comprising consumer-centric, insight-based stories that resonate. It is critical to identify stakeholders, their business priorities and how they plan, activate and strategize.

So, who does the curation? Where the responsibility for curation resides can depend on your organization’s structure. It is often a key function of research or insights departments and/or knowledge management teams. The need is often greatest for those with responsibilities that span markets, categories or brands. But even in a single-region, single-brand role, there can still be a ton of information to manage. Curation can be done in-house or on the supplier side. With increasing time pressures and resource constraints, many on the client side are looking to suppliers to provide both capacity help and additional tools and expertise. Others bring in a supplier to provide an external lens on their data and information.

Myriad benefits

Just as weight loss is something most of us contemplate from time to time on different scales and scopes, curation is also something that businesses of all sizes and shapes should consider. The scope of curation can range from smaller one-off projects to ongoing programs and from small to large budgets. Just as weight loss comes with myriad benefits so too does curation.

To keep the metaphor going, just as exercise helps transform fat into muscle, curation helps transform and elevate data into more effective actionable insights. This means a stronger return on research spend, because existing data, research and insights are reused and put into action.

In the same way losing weight can make a person faster, curation can drive speed and agility. Curation enables you to start a step ahead by understanding what you already know. It gives you an on-demand arsenal to address future questions, course-correct and anticipate market triggers. With the luxury of time gone, curation focuses on making businesses always-ready and future-ready.

Weight loss is not just about immediate gratification but also about health and long-term wellness. Similarly, in the struggle against infobesity, curation can help an organization drive an ongoing learning culture by making insights memorable, digestible and at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds.

Specific trigger moments

While many may contemplate weight loss at the start of the year, people are more likely to undertake the necessary actions if they have a specific need in mind: looking good for a wedding; attending a reunion with people they want to impress; vacations; health scares, etc. Curation too has specific trigger moments of high need and high reward that can help motivate you to start to address your infobesity issues (Figure 1).

Just like a big goal such as weight loss can be daunting, so can the idea of transforming the vast array of organizational data and knowledge into actionable insights. We find it’s best to start by identifying an easy first project, such as curating knowledge to determine how to better meet the needs of a particular demographic group. Small actions are often easier to commit to and maintain – and can lead to big results.

A customized approach is also key to both weight loss and curation. No one answer is right for everyone, as what works best depends on the individual’s challenges and needs. We believe each curation study should also be tailored to the client’s specific needs, challenges and audiences. We utilize a proprietary framework for curation but the inputs and outputs are always driven by the particular needs of the client. In some cases, we may supplement client information with our syndicated learnings and resources when needed. Outputs range from infographics to videos and podcasts to microsites developed on our client’s existing knowledge platforms or our own platform. Just as tailoring your approach to exercise increases the likelihood you will see results, tailoring curation also increases the value and actionability of the final results.

When undertaking a weight-loss plan, expert advice can be critical. Often people employ doctors and personal trainers to help ensure success. At Ipsos, we find that curation also requires a team approach. A key first step taken by our curators is to build a multidisciplinary support system that taps our collective expertise to ensure success. That support system may include a behavioral scientist or a semiotician or a trends expert. Listening and AI are also tools that can be utilized when curating.

At this point in the year, chances are your initial resolutions have fallen by the wayside. But there is nothing that says you can’t replace your previous resolutions with a new one. Consider curation and help make a dent in the infobesity epidemic.