An understanding of customer demand is critical for small and large businesses to grow profitably. Market research can build this understanding, but, in the past, many market research options were time consuming and expensive. They typically involved hiring a market research company to conduct focus groups or surveys using a customer panel or buying large datasets from a syndicated data supplier. And, they didn’t always offer a good solution to the specific questions that a business was trying to answer. Now, new technologies and ideas like crowdsourcing are driving innovation in the market research landscape and promising to disrupt the status quo.