Technology Innovation Award Winners 2025
Zappi takes the prize with its Innovation System
A round up of the 2025 ASC/MRS Technology Innovation Award
Can software that allows concept creators to be innovative, itself be innovative? ASC’s panel of judges clearly thought it was, handing Zappi Innovation System the winner’s place in the 2025 edition of the ASC/MRS Best Technology Innovation Award across a hotly contested cohort of four finalists. Another entrant, Project Rooftop from Unilever and Vurvey Labs received a special commendation from the judges, who observed all four showed the key signs of innovation they were looking for.
But for the judges tasked with finding one winner, what snatched it for Zappi was the way Zappi Innovation System brings a feed of real-time customer feedback into the heart of new product development to create a continuous learning ecosystem powered by agentic AI. They loved the design of it too, declaring it to be “a shining example of how AI is bringing both creativity and efficiency to the insights process, combining innovation and applicability with great product design.“
A collab between consumer product giant Unilever and AI developer Vurvey Labs also caught the judges eyes, causing them to award Project Rooftop the status of “highly commended” to a groundbreaking Large Persona Model which offers insight and marketing teams and product innovators an always-on resource to guide their decision-making, including providing a “consumer twin”, a persona synthesised from real customer insight.
“We could not be happier, seeing a major corporation, a technology developer and insight data come together in this way,” said AJ Johnson, chair of the judging panel.
The two other finalists also presented impressive products, each continuing the AI-dominated theme. Discuss offered their Genie AI Experience Agents as a way to reimagine qual research by combining AI with emotionally intelligent engagement. While Inspirient’s GenAI for Quant Analytics presented a revolutionary end-to-end research workflow that dramatically reduces analysis time by engaging what they term ‘rigorous statistical reasoning’ to make analysis into an autonomous activity.
Something that marks out the ASC/MRS award from many industry awards is that the judges are all technology experts and take a very detailed and hands-on look at the technology being offered. It makes the award even more valuable to winners and finalists, as it provides a rare independent endorsement of what they have produced.
The 2026 edition of the award will be open again in early summer to anyone with an innovative technology product relevant to research, insights or data. Look out for announcements nearer the time or check the ASC website.