YouthSight Launches Co-creation Tool

London-based YouthSight has introduced a new co-creation tool called 'Bright Young Minds', which segments the 'best and brightest' students and young people from its OpinionPanel Community for projects including new product development and innovation.

Founded in 2004 as OpinionPanel, YouthSight initially focused on the UK university student market, and now offers access to other groups of young people such as sixth formers at school and college, 18,000 graduates and young professionals, and 70,000 students in higher education.

The firm's new service taps into its panel of 115,000 young people (aged 16-28), to enable researchers, marketers, brand specialists, designers and policy makers to identify those with the most 'ideation potential'.

Based on collaborative work with academics from the London School of Economics and the Nottingham Business School, together with in-house researchers, Bright Young Minds (BYM) uses a system that profiles young people into groups such as 'Connecteds', 'Creatives', Curious Minds', 'Market Mavens' and 'Civic Activists'.

YouthSight says that in its own tests the 'Creatives' group 'massively outscored' other demographically matched respondents in terms of openness, idea generation fluency, rarity, and originality; while the 'Connected' group 'significantly outscored' the control group in terms of online assessment tools such as Twitalyzer and TwitterGrader.

Additionally, the company is using a process to spot opinion leaders, and these characteristics can be overlaid on top of core BYM segments to identify what it describes as 'young, highly creative and highly influential gamers'.

Project Director, Melanie Cohen (pictured) comments: 'Bright Young Minds can be accessed for research purposes by anyone looking to engage with the young, creative and connected people who drive successful and growing brands. It is an ideal tool for researchers involved in qualitative or quantitative research, large scale ideation, new product development and innovation.'

Web site: www.youthsight.com .