archive for the ‘ethnography’ category

To tweak or not to tweak… that is (not!) the question

15 November 2011 | Editor

Forbes has some interesting commentary on Steve Jobs and whether Malcolm Gladwell (yes, him again) is wrong in calling Steve a "tweaker" and therefore less of a visionary or "true" inventor. Obviously, we believe there's more to all of this. Given our experiences, here are some of our thoughts...

From lean startups to open innovation success

28 July 2011 | Lawrence Lee

A startup is any organization of any size dedicated to creating something new under conditions of uncertainty; the challenge is how to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a path to a successful, sustainable business. I'm not going to restate all of the points in Eric Ries' PARC Forum talk -- you can watch it here -- instead, I want to share how we’ve been practicing similar concepts at PARC and compare and contrast some specific Lean Startup methods with our practices in Open Innovation. One key difference for example is in the strategy of MVP.

Making work visible: For business practice transformation

19 April 2011 | Peggy Szymanski

"Murky" can describe problems in organizations where you see the cloudy fog obscuring what you’re trying to get at, but you don’t know what’s behind it. "Wicked" can describe problems in organizations that are too tangled to tease apart, politically loaded, or just plain difficult. Whether you want to tactically address an acute process problem in a specific department, or strategically transform the way an entire company fundamentally operates, learns new practices, or engages at the critical "customer front", ethnography-based work practice study is a powerful tool for making work visible...

Finding inbox meaning in a time of overload

4 February 2011 | Victoria Bellotti

[Editor’s note: PARC contributed this post to Inbox Love (produced by 500 Startups).] Email is, for many knowledge workers, a habitat: the place where they spend most of their working day online. Indeed it can be thought of as knowledge work’s Grand Central Station as far as information distribution and workflow are concerned. A major part of knowledge worker information overload is trying to manage the influx of email content in terms of prioritizing obligations communicated via email and making sure they can always locate the resources they need within all the content in their inbox. In order to handle the demands being placed upon it, email needs to be far better integrated with its users’ content, communication streams, and productivity tools, and come pre-armed with powerful features to support things like content organization, project planning, workflow, content retrieval, analytics and so on...

Mythbusting: Corporate ethnography and the giant green button

20 December 2010 | Editor

Because ethnography provides a complete, nuanced, and valid picture of people’s practices, processes, and product use in context, it’s a powerful tool that can provide actionable insight and reduce corporate R&D risk. The pioneering use of social scientists in technology corporations -- often referred to as corporate ethnography -- has largely been attributed to, well, us. But this isn't intended to be a who-begat-whom post. We're just trying to set the record straight on the popular tale of ethnography at PARC, because the way the story unfolds reveals how powerful a tool it can be...

Ethnography in Industry: Methods for distributed & large data sets (part two)

30 August 2010 | Nick Yee

We believe that virtual worlds and similar Web 2.0 spaces hint at an emerging mixed or "hybrid" ethnographic methodology that depends on agile collaborations between quantitative researchers, qualitative researchers, and software engineers. This is not just an academic enterprise. The ability to glean this data has many implications for designing and scaffolding online communities, learning new aspects of personality and social behavior in online worlds, and mapping digital personas to physical needs. The ability to leverage this architecture for more tailored marketing is one commercial opportunity. In addition to inferring basic demographics, personality inferences may lead to more nuanced methods of targeted advertising. And the ability to infer demographics based on online interaction metrics helps fill in the gaps left from zip code segmentation alone -- after all, not everyone who lives in your neighborhood (or in your home!) is exactly like you...

PARC Innovations Update (2010 #3)

23 August 2010 | Editor

[e-newsletter archive ~June-August 2009] ethnography special: innovation where people meet technology

Innovating when you don’t know what you don’t know

16 August 2010 | Mark Bernstein

[Xconomy invited this post from PARC CEO Mark Bernstein.] Innovation is everywhere. So then where does differentiation come from? Most directly, competitive advantage comes from creating new business propositions in a disrupted environment. (If compelling enough, a novel offering can itself be the source of disruption.) Startups, especially in Silicon Valley, have been glorified as the vehicles of disruption and creative destruction. Yet… the reality is, when corporations are innovating incrementally, there’s probably not much difference between acquiring a startup, licensing a patent or two from a university, or building a technology with internal R&D. Because in all these cases, the company clearly knows what it wants. The market has signaled what features are desired and getting there is a matter of tactics—identify the right startup, patents, or internal team/expertise. But what happens when the market doesn’t exist yet? Or when it’s too time-consuming and expensive to absorb a startup into your corporate culture—let alone to compete with your competitors to court the targeted startup?

Ethnography in industry: Methods overview (part one)

14 June 2010 | James Glasnapp

It's really hard for companies to understand ethnography -- even after they understand what objectives it can be used for. In this second post in our series on ethnography, I thought it might be useful to provide an overview of data COLLECTION methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population or situation of interest; while specific needs vary, for our clients the general goal is to help them address a murky problem or innovate differentiated products. Note the emphasis on data "collection" as opposed to data ANALYSIS...The science and art of ethnography is not in a preset formula for these individual methods. It's in the selection, unique combination, customizations, and analysis -- which together can yield the "deep" understanding that in turn inspires innovation, or fosters change. There IS a method to the madness.

Ethnography in industry: Objectives?

27 April 2010 | Victoria Bellotti

All of us have encountered a lot of confusion and misconceptions about ethnography, especially relative to the many methods that can be used to inform technology design. In my first post here, I’d really rather respond to the obvious and eminently reasonable question I often hear in my work as a researcher in the field of user-centered technology innovation: “What’s it good for, in my business?” In today’s hard-nosed and often economically trying times, ethnography can be seen as a tactical weapon enabling companies to gather new insights and thus gain advantage over their competition. Ethnographers’ data collection and analysis methods have therefore been condensed, recombined, adapted – both systematically and as-needed – to meet these business demands.